Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

I think implicit conversions is the other billion dollar mistake in computing. It just shows up as a subtle source of mistakes in so many places. JavaScript, MySQL, YAML, Excel, PHP, just to make a few off the top of my head, have all caused countless bugs and security exploits due to implicit conversations of data which can be interpreted in multiple ways, and where the system happened to pick the wrong one.

As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers.<p>I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way.<p>They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read offensive words into it. Depending on the structure of data this prefix could even be compressed with 0 bits.

2020 article with this update:<p>Update October 24th, 2023, 11:25AM ET: Microsoft has updated Excel on Windows and macOS, adding a toggle to turn off automatic data conversion. The original version of this article continues below.

I&#x27;m really annoyed that even Open&#x2F;LibreOffice copied this crap behaviour.<p>I try to avoid spreadsheets. I won&#x27;t use them unless there&#x27;s calculations to be done.<p>When I do use them, the first thing when I create a new sheet is to select all cells and set it to text. It&#x27;s probably a bad habit, but it&#x27;s the only way to avoid future frustration and mistakes.

So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel?

Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work. If these &quot;scientists&quot; are having this problem then they haven&#x27;t spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on. Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?

It&#x27;s from August 2020 with the latest update almost 6 months ago. Wondering how it got so many upvotes on HN now.

Previously discussed (621 comments):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24070385">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24070385</a>

The article has now been edited to note that Excel now offers a toggle to turn this feature off.<p>How long did the entire genetics community struggle with this problem before deciding to rename a bunch of genes, making their own data harder to search, without just...asking Microsoft to add a new toggle for their use case?

I dont really get why every tool must be suited for everyone.<p>If excel (which was absolutely not designed for genetic research) is bad for genetic research purposes why blame microsoft.<p>Its like a craft man complaining that a screwdriver is a bad tool if your job is to put in nails.

One good solution rather than Excel is org-mode. See the original Google talk by org-mode creator [1]. At some point 30 minutes or so, he explains how to use org-mode as a spreadsheet.<p>Not so powerful as Excel, even though missing features might be trivially added. I haven&#x27;t tried it myself but i want to really dive into it&#x27;s functionality. Org-mode is really great at many things, spreadsheets might as well be one more.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM</a>

Oh, come on.<p>Just format the range as text before pasting or importing the data (right-click -&gt; format cells -&gt; category = text). Text-formatted ranges don&#x27;t convert input data.<p>The article also doesn&#x27;t help saying that there is a toggle for implicit conversions. You want text, you preformat as text.<p>Just learn to use the damn thing before you bash it. Especially if it&#x27;s your daily driver.

Title should have the (2020) suffix

Isn&#x27;t it possible to just set the format of the cell to plain text ? Whoever works with genetic data in Excel should know how to do this, if correct.

(2020)<p>More discussion then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24070385">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24070385</a>

The Onions become so lame I’m just gonna start collecting headlines like this

I need to introduce my customers using Excel to the typecasting concept. :o&gt;

Keep using excel, access, js and Python. It’ll be fine. &gt;.&gt;

In this thread:<p>People who don&#x27;t understand that excel is just a tool, which is useful but has flaws, arguing with people who don&#x27;t understand that experts care about solutions not the tools, in which case it might be ok to compromise something unimportant, like the _name_ of something.<p>What these two sides have in common is the contempt for the actual experts for not building a tool that HN could build but wouldn&#x27;t know how to use.<p>Peak HN.

To be expected from people who ended up in bio

Wow... this sound like something that could have happened in the 80s... A bit ridiculous.

Science 0 Excel 1

Why not use LibreOffice instead?

&gt; Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates<p>I thought they fixed that bug. Oh wait, this is Microsoft. &#x2F;s