How about just not auto-convert everything and keep the integrity of the data unless specifically asked to? Is that so hard?
Microsoft assumes their users are complete idiots, even when they (the users) are actively trying to convince them (Microsoft) otherwise. No matter how advanced the feature may be, they'll assume you found instructions somewhere to do something entirely unrelated and they constantly have to save you from yourself. As a result you constantly have to fight the OS for access and control to get it to do what you want.
If you're even a bit of a power user that is, of course.
But more often than not Microsoft's assumption is probably spot on.
That assumption is perfectly good for a default. Not a mandatory feature that power users have to live with.
Excel is inherently flawed in its design.
The thing is, that excel already has half the means of what would be necessary to really fix this bug. That is a field for each cell where the original text can stay.
An excel sheet is just a bunch of XML files zipped in a specific structure. You can unpack a file and look for yourself.
Each worksheet is it's own file and each cell is subdivided into the value and the formula, that generated this value (or nothing, if there is no formula).
Excel could easily fix this issue by adding another possible cell attribute like "original" or "plain" that, when set, allows you to roll back any conversion.
But no, they go a half assed way as always and screw up even more.
In order to do that I think they would first have to ratify a standards change to the Excel format, which is open.
Me before reading the article: It's got to be dates. Excel thinks everything is a date.
Me after reading the article: Even the workaround is halfhearted. Jeebus.
Microsoft’s blog adds caveats, such as that Excel avoids the conversion by saving the data as text, which means the data may not work for calculations later. There’s also a known issue where you can’t disable the conversions when running macros.
Apart from actual dates.
The idea that any scientist is doing data analysis in Excel is honestly terrifying on every level.
You don't want to know...
I remember when a biologist asked us for help - Excel crashed on processing his 700MB tables. Took some time and Chatgpt to convince him to do the analysis in R. It worked out in the end and he is now recommending this solution to his colleagues, which is nice.
Excel is excellent at data analysis... Python integrations and everything
As an alternative, maybe just Python?
Because every scientist is also a programmer?
Especially if they struggle to use Excel properly, no chance.
Thank god! You have no idea how awful this is for scientists. Need to paste some gene names down? Better hope it’s not MARCHF8 or in the Septin gene family, otherwise you have to convert columns to text then import the data. Seems like a simple fix, but many wet lab biologists are technologically challenged.
"Microsoft’s blog adds caveats, such as that Excel avoids the conversion by saving the data as text, which means the data may not work for calculations later. There’s also a known issue where you can’t disable the conversions when running macros. "
This sounds very half assed...
It's no good having this as part of the user options. It should be a sheet characteristic and the default should be "keep cells exactly as entered regardless of data type".
Changing the default will break the workflows of tens of thousands in the business industry
Scientists should be using something like MATLAB, not Excel.
Matlab is used, if at all, by physicists.
We're talking about molecular biologists.
Now if only it would stop dropping leading zeros unless you ask it, and we got rid of the MM/DD/yyyy date format entirely.
Now if only it would stop dropping leading zeros unless you ask it
That appears to actually be a feature.
MM/DD/YYYY is the correct format here in America.
I think the point was that the format itself is odd. I am European and it's weird to me: logically it should be either from greatest to smallest, or from smallest to greatest, not a weird in-between.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically.
Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
Excel’s automatic conversions are intended to make it easier and faster to input certain types of commonly entered data — numbers and dates, for instance.
But for scientists using quick shorthand to make things legible, it could ruin published, peer-reviewed data, as a 2016 study found.
Microsoft detailed the update in a blog post this week, adding a checkbox labeled “Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date.” You can probably guess what that toggles.
The update builds on the Automatic Data Conversions settings the company added last year, which included the option for Excel to warn you when it’s about to get extra helpful and let you load your file without automatic conversion so you can ensure nothing will be screwed up by it.
The original article contains 225 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 18%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Why are scientists using a paid service such as Excel anyway? Shouldn't they be using something like Libre Open Office?
Many scientists are based out of corporations or universities who contract with Microsoft, so Excel would be the default solution for working with spreadsheets.
Also, when it comes to “office” applications, there is no real substitute for Excel. Word processing, presentations, email, notes; there are many open and closed source alternatives that will do the same if not better than MS Office applications. Excel, however, is the exception.
LibreOffice Calc, G-Sheets, Apple’s Numbers, or the myriad of competitor office solutions have never matched Excel for in-depth analyses or overall function. For just basic features, one could limp by with most alternatives, but doing real analytical work within spreadsheets requires Excel.
"Real analytical work" shouldn't be done in spreadsheets at all. You should use a database. Basic spreadsheet features are all you should ever use spreadsheet software to do anyway.
While you will commonly hear that you shouldn’t use Excel as a database, it happens all the time.
Excel is generally more accessible than something like Access or other proprietary database applications, and given that a lot of initial data originally lives in a spreadsheet, it’s the simplest solution that doesn’t require something like SQL coding knowledge to access.
Basic spreadsheet features are all you should ever use spreadsheet software to do anyway.
It depends on what you mean when you say “basic”. A spreadsheet with filters or maybe some pivot tables? A spreadsheet connecting to 12 others with refreshes created using VBA code so that end users just need to click a button and see their data? A spreadsheet that connects to a database, runs several queries, and spits out data in an easy to read form? There are folks who consider pivot tables and the use of any code to be “advanced” use of Excel. There are also folks who have made full-on applications with Excel and consider those to be made with only “intermediate” grade knowledge.
I’ve found that the more you know about an application like Excel, the more you realize what you don’t know.
Excel does 1000 different things, and for 998 of them, there's at least one better option.
The two things Excel does best: 1) be accessible to everyone from the greenest high schooler to the most senior IT admin. 2) do those 1000 different things at least somewhat competently.
Exactly. Like personally I’d rather do libreoffice for data entry, spit out a csv, and slap that into an R based analyzer, that’s because I have an irrational hate for excel’s graphs compared to ggplot2. I do use excel a lot though in my job because fuck it it just works for basically everything
“Real analytical work” (I will take that to mean work people actually care about and may even pay good money for), is done with whatever does the job, on the given timeframe, and the analyst, researcher, or team are comfortable with. That may well be Excel. Or not. Depending on the task and people. But your audience will always care more for the appropriateness of your analytical approach for the given audience and task, and of course your results, rather than the tools you used to get there. Of course spreadsheets have limitations and one will do well to know them.
As a user you don't always have access to the database. It's much easier to work out of Excel than to find the right person to ask in the corporate hierarchy just for them to say no.
In college a professor gave us some homework to be done in excel, and as the nerd that I am, I asked if Livre Office was ok because I use Linux and have no access to Excel. The professor was like, well in that case everyone do the homework on R or python. My classmates were really mad at me for that.
By experience, being a scientist doesn't mean one is the smartest guy in the room. Just that one has passion and luck and luxury to pursue that passion.
Many use alternatives to excel (R, python, Matlab, libreoffice).
For others installing a software is challenging enough that they use whatever provided by IT.
The remaining don't give a sh*it, they are too busy in exploiting or in being exploited. No time to think about what is better
I've had the same copy of excel since high school, and it's done a damn fine job processing experimental date through undergrad, my PhD, and 6 years as a working researcher.
It's also the software pretty much everyone has, so you can easily share data with collaborators and other researchers. And it has a ton of functionality so you can process and analyze data easily, and create the visuals for papers very easily.
Microsoft fixes one of the Excel features that wreck scientific data.
20 years after the problem was first reported.
Meaning there's still hope for XDG support in Firefox?
This isn't a fix. Excel wasn't meant for this. While I do understand it's convenient as a database, unless you're doing something unimportant and small you just really should use something proper. And even now that this "problem" is gone, I am certain there are still more things that cause trouble. You can not satisfy everyone and Excel was just... not made for gene info storage.
Even if you don't want to use stuff that isn't Microsoft Office, that comes with Microsoft Access, which is a proper database management system. It's literally in the same software package, so why do people refuse to use it?
Why would you need a full blown (shitty) relational database management system to store gene info? Excel should be just fine for storing data in arbitrary tables. It shouldn't make assumptions about your data by default, and changing values that look like they're in a specific format should be opt-in, not default behavior.
It shouldn't make assumptions about your data by default, and changing values that look like they're in a specific format should be opt-in, not default behavior
But that's exactly what made the "auto" data type of Excel such a powerful tool when introduced. If you're storing text, make the datatype "text", problem solved.
Nowadays, when making stuff like Excel from scratch, you could opt for a "these look like dates, change the type from 'none' to 'date'?" but with middle management being conditioned on the data type being 'auto', that's something that's hard to change.
Optimist: The glass is half full.
Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Realist: The glass is twice as big as necessary.
Excel: The glass is the 2nd of January.
I'm so sick of people using Excel for things it's not supposed to be used for.
As a general rule if you're not actually making use of the formula tool, you probably don't need to be using Excel.
It's too late though, scientists already had to rename the genes. Although of course there are other things that can trigger it, not just in science.
From the article:
The problem of Excel software (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA) inadvertently converting gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers was originally described in 2004 [1]. For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to ‘2-Sep’ and ‘1-Mar’, respectively. Furthermore, RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession ‘2310009E13’ to ‘2.31E+13’). Since that report, we have uncovered further instances where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. ‘SEPT2’ converted to ‘2006/09/02’). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles.
Office Libre is free, and modern MS Office UIs looks like dog dookie. OL can also save in Excel format if you want.
Hey look at that, I found a solution that didn't require they change their entire process or have to wait for Microsloughed to get their act together.
What about text selection knowing better what I want to select?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
