5 ms·

Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes

26 points by blahedo 3y ago

cratermoon 3y ago
I'd kind of like to be a fly on the wall at the business when a billion dollars disappear at the intersection of wrong settings in Automatic Data Conversion and decade-old legacy data (manual) processing.
happymellon 3y ago
I get really surprised every time it comes up, that something else hasn't come up, like Access or Libreoffice Base, that people in non-finance fields organically gathered around because of it being: - Easier to use - Less likely to eat your data - Less limitations (although we missed taking advantage of the limited columns issue in Excel) I understand the concept that Excel is easy to get started with and Access wasn't provided with the lower options of Office, but it still seems odd.
- hulitu 3y ago
  Libreoffice has trouble with big datasets. Since some time, Excel is the only one able to process big spreadsheets. I hate Excel and i would love to see LibreOffice being used, but in this case Excel is better. Access was usually a distinctive option of the Office package. And the interface was strange.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    Completely agree. It just feels strange that everyone keeps using a spreadsheet that's done everything from destroying economies because of miscalculating whether austerity was bad, to screwing up multiple scientific papers in different ways; and that nothing better has come along.
hulitu 3y ago
> Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes That was a bug. Converting every damn number to dates is not and has never been a feature. Importing csv or text files was always an exercise in pain because of this bug disguised as a feature.
vivekd 3y ago
This is one of the main reasons I don't use Microsoft products. I hate that they insist on changing what I type as I type. I hate having to keep turning automatic formatting in word and I can't stand that vs code keeps popping up distracting bubbles. I turn them off but they don't seem to stay off. I wish they'd just step aside and let me work
- anon373839 3y ago
  +1,000,000
- Already__Taken 3y ago
  Even edge is just Chrome with popups.
- finnh 3y ago
  stop using MS products, then?
zeroimpl 3y ago
> Remove leading zeros and convert to a number This is stupid. If a leading zero was input, it was intended to be there and probably isn't a number. Been burned by this many times. > Keep first 15 digits of long numbers and convert to scientific notation This is stupid. If scientific notation was intended, somebody would have input it that way. This unnecessarily discards data. Been burned by this many times. > Convert digits surrounding the letter "E" to a number in scientific notation This actually makes sense I think? > Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date This is fairly stupid - dates ought to have delimiters between things (and a year!). Been burned by this a few times.

26 points by blahedo 3y ago

I'd kind of like to be a fly on the wall at the business when a billion dollars disappear at the intersection of wrong settings in Automatic Data Conversion and decade-old legacy data (manual) processing.

happymellon 3y ago

I get really surprised every time it comes up, that something else hasn't come up, like Access or Libreoffice Base, that people in non-finance fields organically gathered around because of it being: - Easier to use - Less likely to eat your data - Less limitations (although we missed taking advantage of the limited columns issue in Excel) I understand the concept that Excel is easy to get started with and Access wasn't provided with the lower options of Office, but it still seems odd.

hulitu 3y ago
Libreoffice has trouble with big datasets. Since some time, Excel is the only one able to process big spreadsheets. I hate Excel and i would love to see LibreOffice being used, but in this case Excel is better. Access was usually a distinctive option of the Office package. And the interface was strange.
- happymellon 3y ago
  Completely agree. It just feels strange that everyone keeps using a spreadsheet that's done everything from destroying economies because of miscalculating whether austerity was bad, to screwing up multiple scientific papers in different ways; and that nothing better has come along.

hulitu 3y ago

> Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes That was a bug. Converting every damn number to dates is not and has never been a feature. Importing csv or text files was always an exercise in pain because of this bug disguised as a feature.

vivekd 3y ago

This is one of the main reasons I don't use Microsoft products. I hate that they insist on changing what I type as I type. I hate having to keep turning automatic formatting in word and I can't stand that vs code keeps popping up distracting bubbles. I turn them off but they don't seem to stay off. I wish they'd just step aside and let me work

anon373839 3y ago
+1,000,000
Already__Taken 3y ago
Even edge is just Chrome with popups.
finnh 3y ago
stop using MS products, then?

zeroimpl 3y ago

> Remove leading zeros and convert to a number This is stupid. If a leading zero was input, it was intended to be there and probably isn't a number. Been burned by this many times. > Keep first 15 digits of long numbers and convert to scientific notation This is stupid. If scientific notation was intended, somebody would have input it that way. This unnecessarily discards data. Been burned by this many times. > Convert digits surrounding the letter "E" to a number in scientific notation This actually makes sense I think? > Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date This is fairly stupid - dates ought to have delimiters between things (and a year!). Been burned by this a few times.