A lot of scientists are very bright people that can't invest the time to learn another tool that maybe is worse than Excel (e.g. Google Docs also does the gene-

A lot of scientists are very bright people that can't invest the time to learn another tool that maybe is worse than Excel (e.g. Google Docs also does the gene-to-date swapping, try writting "SEPT2", the known gene [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPT2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPT2] in a cell), investing time and effort in changing pipelines that work for them. Instead, the path of least resistance is to change the name of all known genes that cause problems with Excel. Biologist are changing and adding names all the time, so it's not like this is new. E.g. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q04609/entry#names_and_taxonomy https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q04609/entry#names_and_tax... shows you a gene with 5 names.