"There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for indiv

"There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns. 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." These are easy fixes. I have this problem using excel. Just format your data as text. If you do that and give the excel file to someone else the errors will not be introduced again. The quote above is at best misleading and I would say just wrong. The problem only happens when you import data in a non-excel format like comma delimited. In that case you have to click on a button when importing to excel to import it as "text" instead of automatic excel formatting. It would be great if you could set this as the default (maybe you can, but I don't know how), but it is something you get used to very quickly. Think of all of the financial people that use excel that would have this same problem. I'm sure there are some mess ups, but I don't think that industry has the same endemic problem with this excel file formatting issue. There are definitely problems with using excel, but I don't think this would have to be one of them. Edit: Of course it is not an easy fix to get everyone to use Excel correctly, but these types of bad data errors come from all over the place if the person using the data is not careful.