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Have you seen the kind of mess Excel can make with a CSV file? The names of several genes were recently changed so that Excel would stop mangling them.

by mark-r 6y ago

whimsicalism 6y ago
CSV != Excel. I work CSVs regularly and can't recall the last time I opened up Excel (intentionally)
- mark-r 6y ago
  Doesn't Excel by default capture the .csv extension so that it gets called automatically when you try to open the file? Since Excel is one of the few standard pieces of software that knows how to open CSV, it gets used a lot of times when it shouldn't. There's another post I made comparing Excel to a swiss army knife, and there's a reason for that.
  - adwww 6y ago
    I don't know many engineers - even in the data team - with an Office license.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      I think our company has a company-wide license for Office. When IT sets up a machine you get it automatically. Microsoft works hard to get those kind of setups to be common-place.
      - adwww 6y ago
        Last time I worked in a big corporate you had to fill in a long form to request a license for anything you needed. If you didn't use it again within a fortnight or so it got yoinked away... The startups I've worked at since have all been big on GSuite.
  - foobar1962 6y ago
    The problem with Excel is that it changes the data, silently.
  - jugg1es 6y ago
    Sure it does but it doesn't give a f*k - once you open it in excel, it does its' own formatting and will save that incorrect formatting even if you save the CSV as a CSV
- mark-r 6y ago
  P.S. It doesn't matter if you never personally load a CSV into Excel. You need to ensure nobody upstream or downstream from you does either.
jugg1es 6y ago
Excel removes leading zeros from numeric fields no matter what you do and you cannot turn it off. This is a huge problem in healthcare where many patient identifiers have leading zeros
- mark-r 6y ago
  Zip codes are a problem for the same reason.

Have you seen the kind of mess Excel can make with a CSV file? The names of several genes were recently changed so that Excel would stop mangling them.

by mark-r 6y ago

Have you seen the kind of mess Excel can make with a CSV file? The names of several genes were recently changed so that Excel would stop mangling them.

whimsicalism 6y ago

CSV != Excel. I work CSVs regularly and can't recall the last time I opened up Excel (intentionally)

mark-r 6y ago
Doesn't Excel by default capture the .csv extension so that it gets called automatically when you try to open the file? Since Excel is one of the few standard pieces of software that knows how to open CSV, it gets used a lot of times when it shouldn't. There's another post I made comparing Excel to a swiss army knife, and there's a reason for that.
- adwww 6y ago
  I don't know many engineers - even in the data team - with an Office license.
  - mark-r 6y ago
    I think our company has a company-wide license for Office. When IT sets up a machine you get it automatically. Microsoft works hard to get those kind of setups to be common-place.
    - adwww 6y ago
      Last time I worked in a big corporate you had to fill in a long form to request a license for anything you needed. If you didn't use it again within a fortnight or so it got yoinked away... The startups I've worked at since have all been big on GSuite.
- foobar1962 6y ago
  The problem with Excel is that it changes the data, silently.
- jugg1es 6y ago
  Sure it does but it doesn't give a f*k - once you open it in excel, it does its' own formatting and will save that incorrect formatting even if you save the CSV as a CSV
mark-r 6y ago
P.S. It doesn't matter if you never personally load a CSV into Excel. You need to ensure nobody upstream or downstream from you does either.

jugg1es 6y ago

Excel removes leading zeros from numeric fields no matter what you do and you cannot turn it off. This is a huge problem in healthcare where many patient identifiers have leading zeros

mark-r 6y ago
Zip codes are a problem for the same reason.