I used to work as a bioinformatics programmer, and in some cases I did some processing in an afternoon, including writing a python script, that a postdoc had us

I used to work as a bioinformatics programmer, and in some cases I did some processing in an afternoon, including writing a python script, that a postdoc had used a month doing manually in Excel. While the tools often are crude, a problem is that biochemical and molecular biology researchers lack the bioinformatics skills and other IT skills that often is badly needed in modern genetic research. The core competence of these researchers is in the lab, and bioinformatics skills is outside of that. That you see effects like conversion of gene names in excel does not surprise me at all. You also see the same problem in other areas where researchers need skills outside of their usual comfort zone. The classical example is statistics.