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.
Holy shit! Now I just need to talk to some sysadmins and get some group policies set.
Apparently our typical installer for Visio 2016 and our 365 license use “incompatible installers” so it is going to be a pain in the ass for me to have both installed at the same time. Thankfully I’m trusted by IT so I might be able to just do it myself.
Edit: Looks like I’ll need IT after all. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/use-the-office-deployment-tool-to-install-volume-licensed-editions-of-visio-2016
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.
Logically it would be milliseconds since 1970.
Not very good for birthdates.
The idea that any scientist is doing data analysis in Excel is honestly terrifying on every level.
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.
You don’t want to know…
Flashback to the time the UK government lost 16,000 positive COVID patients because Excel has a 1 million row limit.
If only there were better ways of storing large amounts of records with a fixed structure. Maybe the future will provide such technology…
And is so bad at it that they can’t work around this issue.
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.I’d be embarrassed to call myself a scientist if I didn’t know how to at least script basic shit and effortlessly reproduce data analyses. The bar for entry into every single stage of academic science is too fucking low. 95% of this literature is irreproducible shit, in part because fuckwits don’t know how to code. Scientists don’t need to be software engineers, but yes, they need to be able to program. It wasn’t this way 20 years ago, but it most certainly is nowadays.
Excel sucks open ass. At storing data, at displaying data, at analyzing data. Scientists, of all people, should understand how to use an RDBMS and a data processing framework like R.
I believe that accessibility is what makes Excel so good. And the world agrees.
I’ve seen idiots doing “bioinformatics” with excel & vba. FFS.
What the hell else is there? Good luck getting universities using OpenOffice
Scientists should be using programming languages like R or Python. They are both extremely popular in this field, much more than Excel.
Shoulda coulda. Not everyone is a programmer.
Except every scientist and analyst. Stats, data sci and ML is done in R and Python, be it astro, health data or genomics.
If someone has been taught stats in spreadsheet software, they have have been taught wrong, period.
Also, programming is a very strong term. we’re talking about stats in a scripting language, not software development in CPP.
Research projects almost exclusively have more than one person working on them.
They should be if they’re doing data analysis like this.
If it works, it works. Programming is a tough thing to learn.
Programming in R or Python isn’t a lot harder than learning how to get Excel to do what you want. I’d wager it’s easier since you don’t have to fight your tools.
Excel has its place for simple quick calculations. But at some point it’s simply the wrong tool.
20 years after the problem was first reported.
Meaning there’s still hope for XDG support in Firefox?
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.
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.
Sqlite and duckdb are great, I don’t know about shitty.
You don’t get the visual feedback but the query language, reliability and python interface are all top notch.
That is not what it was made for. It was made to do shenanigans with values like doing math on them and plotting graphs. If you merely want data storage, use a table. I agree, a database is overkill for most things, but that doesn’t change the fact that Excel is the wrong tool for the job. Maybe if they added a table mode where it’s basically just a frontend for a csv it’d work, but right now I’d still say it’s better to use a scalpel than a hammer, even if scissors do the trick just fine.
Agree. Excel is terribly inefficient if your goal is just storing data.
Convinient arbitrary table software goes brrrr.
Do you really don’t know why, or are you being sarcastic?
I’ve never used Access personally, so I don’t know if it’s any good or not, I’m just frustrated by people using spreadsheets for data storage.
It’s been years since I used it tbh. But “access bad” is a meme for a reason
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.
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.
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”.
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…
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.
Libre calc is one of the worst UXs I have ever had the displeasure of using. I can’t imagine anyone recommending it is using it as their main work application.
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?
You are completely right, and the Open Science movement is catching on. The idea is to give everyone access to the (anonymised) data and use only tools that are freely accessible, even to scientists from developing countries without Microsoft licenses, so that they too can rerun your analyses and verify your results. You shouldn’t be getting downvoted.
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.
Why should they do that?
In science, it is important to have verifiable and replicable results. This means everything you use - from ingredients to software - should be transparent. We can’t examine Excel’s source code, so we don’t know if it is working as it claims to be. Most scientific disciplines are moving towards open source, open access etc., and you can’t use Excel in fields like physics or mathematical biology. But molecular biology is a bit of a holdout.
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.
FFS, scientists should know how to handle data, and Excel ain’t it.
how about fuck MS?
