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Scientists Rename Genes Because Microsoft Excel Reads Them as Dates

posted by chromas on Friday August 07 2020, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the ' dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates:

Microsoft Excel’s automatic formatting is normally helpful for finishing spreadsheets quickly, but it’s proving to be an agent of chaos for geneticists. The Verge has learned that the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee has issued guidelines for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1), for example, should now be labeled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.

The names of 27 genes have been changed in the past year to avoid Excel-related errors, HGNC coordinator Elspeth Bruford said. This isn’t a rare error, either, as Excel had affected about a fifth of genetics-related papers examined in a 2016 study.

Journal Reference:
Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, Assam El-Osta. Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature [open], Genome Biology (DOI: 10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Friday August 07 2020, @11:57AM (1 child)

    by Rich (945) on Friday August 07 2020, @11:57AM (#1032819) Journal

    Of course they're going to, eventually. I fear at this point, people get paid more to sabotage LibreOffice than to improve it. It's been going down the drain since Version 5. The Mac version now is near unusable (I still run it, teeth-gnashingly). Their latest, greatest innovations include swapping out their graphics backend (what for?? it's not that their old backend could be the reason for the shitty performance with a couple of rectangles in a drawing) and changing the DOCX-version to current, so every peer receiving a DOCX now has to subscribe to Office 365.

    With all that, I read that Michael Meeks of Collabora has been whining that it's not clear how to make a proper business case out of LO. That guy, in the amount of damage caused to FLOSS, is only second to Miguel de Icaza.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Muad'Dave on Friday August 07 2020, @12:12PM

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Friday August 07 2020, @12:12PM (#1032825)

    That guy, in the amount of damage caused to FLOSS, is only second to Miguel de Icaza.

    Let's not forget Poettering [wikipedia.org] - he brought us winners like "... PulseAudio (2004), Avahi (2005), and systemd (2010)."