Damn near 50 years late. Did the memo that literally everyone hates this feature, and it’s spoiled many scientific studies and brought down multiple businesses just get delivered to their developers?
Its annoying, but to be fair we dont hear about the people auto-date-detection has helped or the time it has saved because those people mostly remain blissfully unaware of it
On a level, I would love if people don't use excel at all for science. The potential damage to your own reputation, for using excel features is enormous. Also, it wreck the work of scientist sharing data https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
Ehhh, everyone in biology has seen the effects of Excel date conversion and has probably experienced it in some of their own data workups. While I have certainly been annoyed that it happens, I do not look down upon other researchers who have a few adulterated septins slip into their work.
Until the day where everyone is computationally savvy and can do their processing in Python/R/Julia, it is the state of the world. As a matter of fact, HUGO agreed to rename some of the worst offender genes to Excel-friendly formats[0].
“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.”
“RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession ‘2310009E13’ to ‘2.31E+13’).”
