> ...Excel could have gotten better, except AFAIK they never fixed the problem with reading genes as dates so they get no benefit of a doubt from me. Not that

> ...Excel could have gotten better, except AFAIK they never fixed the problem with reading genes as dates so they get no benefit of a doubt from me. Not that this is only Excel's fault: Before entering your gene names, select the column they're going in* (by clicking the column header), right-click, select "Format cells" from the pop-up menu, select "Text" from the list on the left of the formatting dialogue, click "OK", and you're done. Now it won't turn text that looks like dates into the numeric representation of a date value. Not exactly rocket surgery. ___ *: Or, if you're just using it for data entry and/or all your data is textual, select the whole sheet by clicking on the grey square in the top left, at the intersection of row numbers and column-name letters.