4 ms·

Damn near 50 years late. Did the memo that literally everyone hates this feature, and it’s spoiled many scientific studies and brought down multiple businesses

• verve_rat 3y ago
  They put it in a spreadsheet, but the ticket number got turned into a date, so it never got processed.
  • donatj 3y ago
    Frankly, I don’t even doubt this could be the real answer. If someone had told me that out of context I wouldn’t even question it like “Oh, that makes sense.”
  • corbezzoli 3y ago
    They put it into a spreadsheet, but the bug list exceeded 65,536 rows so it was silently dropped.[1] [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-may-have-caused-loss-of-16000-covid-tests-in-england
• codeulike 3y ago
  Its annoying, but to be fair we dont hear about the people auto-date-detection has helped or the time it has saved because those people mostly remain blissfully unaware of it
  • jasonladuke0311 3y ago
    Quite an asymmetry there
    • codeulike 3y ago
      why?
  • Veserv 3y ago
    No, it would be fair if it was a option that was turned on by default. Not even having the option to turn it off at all was just plain incompetence.
• aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
• braiamp 3y ago
  On a level, I would love if people don't use excel at all for science. The potential damage to your own reputation, for using excel features is enormous. Also, it wreck the work of scientist sharing data https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
  • Pixie_Dust 3y ago
    Good Grief! “The problem of Excel software (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA) inadvertently converting gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers was originally described in 2004.” “RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession ‘2310009E13’ to ‘2.31E+13’).”
  • fbdab103 3y ago
    Ehhh, everyone in biology has seen the effects of Excel date conversion and has probably experienced it in some of their own data workups. While I have certainly been annoyed that it happens, I do not look down upon other researchers who have a few adulterated septins slip into their work. Until the day where everyone is computationally savvy and can do their processing in Python/R/Julia, it is the state of the world. As a matter of fact, HUGO agreed to rename some of the worst offender genes to Excel-friendly formats[0]. [0]https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
  • melagonster 3y ago
    sorry, this impossible, in most of condition they just need a table that they can record data in it. I don't know any better replacement:(
• fardinahsan 3y ago
  The scientists had it coming for using excel.