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Quote: "There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting..." What kind of loopy Excel variant the article's author

Quote: "There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting..." What kind of loopy Excel variant the article's author is using? It's right there in settings, you can easy stop auto-formatting. Yes, default installation has it on, but it can be turned off.

mplanchard 6y ago
From the article: > Even then, a scientist might fix their own data, but as soon as someone else opens the same spreadsheet in Excel without thinking, errors will be introduced all over again.
- tomiantenna 6y ago
  Ah, the ole "well it worked fine on MY machine". A classic.
conductr 6y ago
Also you can single quote ‘MARCH1 to keep it as string. This is safer as when you share the file you don’t know if the next person has the same settings change you described. Either way, it’s only 27 genes they had to rename. Seems like a good choice on their part to just rename them. Hopefully they’re doing this check during the naming stage for new genes.
- taejo 6y ago
  Now save that file as CSV (maybe because you want to process it with some non-Excel tool) and re-open it. Mar-1.
  - conductr 6y ago
    Touché. I do everything in Excel file formats but I’m also not a scientist.
sseagull 6y ago
Can you explain where? I just booted up a relatively clean copy of Excel 2019 and can't find it after a couple minutes. I see a few autoformatting options, but nothing corresponding to dates. The only options I see are similar to this: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2016/dec/how-to-turn-off-excel-auto-format.html https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2016/dec/how-to-...
epistasis 6y ago
I do not believe it can be turned off, or at least I've never encountered a version where it could be turned off by toggling options. Create a simple CSV file like Gene,value SEPT1,-7 Open it in Excel, and watch SEPT1 be silently converted to 1-Sep, with no way to return. Exce is truly worse than most people can imagine.

mplanchard 6y ago

From the article: > Even then, a scientist might fix their own data, but as soon as someone else opens the same spreadsheet in Excel without thinking, errors will be introduced all over again.

tomiantenna 6y ago
Ah, the ole "well it worked fine on MY machine". A classic.

conductr 6y ago

Also you can single quote ‘MARCH1 to keep it as string. This is safer as when you share the file you don’t know if the next person has the same settings change you described. Either way, it’s only 27 genes they had to rename. Seems like a good choice on their part to just rename them. Hopefully they’re doing this check during the naming stage for new genes.

taejo 6y ago
Now save that file as CSV (maybe because you want to process it with some non-Excel tool) and re-open it. Mar-1.
- conductr 6y ago
  Touché. I do everything in Excel file formats but I’m also not a scientist.

sseagull 6y ago

Can you explain where? I just booted up a relatively clean copy of Excel 2019 and can't find it after a couple minutes. I see a few autoformatting options, but nothing corresponding to dates. The only options I see are similar to this: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2016/dec/how-to-turn-off-excel-auto-format.html https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2016/dec/how-to-...

epistasis 6y ago

I do not believe it can be turned off, or at least I've never encountered a version where it could be turned off by toggling options. Create a simple CSV file like Gene,value SEPT1,-7 Open it in Excel, and watch SEPT1 be silently converted to 1-Sep, with no way to return. Exce is truly worse than most people can imagine.