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Excel is not a genetics tool. It has millions if use cases, many more important than genetics. Excel didn’t care about this. It’s like people complaining becau

Excel is not a genetics tool. It has millions if use cases, many more important than genetics. Excel didn’t care about this. It’s like people complaining because sugar gets misused. Or that murderers stab people with knives. The solutions isn’t to “fix” knives.

saagarjha 2y ago
Excel is a tool for general-purpose data processing. What the genetics people are doing is exactly that.
- lukan 2y ago
  Also it is a somewhat working solution, to ban knives in certain places, like clubs, so people don't become drunk murderers in the first place ..
- jbjbjbjb 2y ago
  General purpose means you’re trying to meet general purposes not every specialised purpose
bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
It's not like you have to be in genetics for excel to bite you. I once had a “business” column in a CSV with one cell set to July 11. Why? Because the business was 7/11. (I assume in a different locale it would've become November 7?) The simple solution is to do what every CSV → DataFrame library does, which is ensure columns are a homogenous type. In this case a single non-date entry in a column would be enough to treat the whole column as string.
Mistletoe 2y ago
Perhaps the first time you start excel maybe a short setup tutorial that sets the default parameters you want for every spreadsheet you create.
- prepend 2y ago
  I don’t think it would have much of an impact. And I hate those forced wizards and tutorials as I use excel in lots of environments. I remember Excel team writing about why they didn’t have advanced settings to turn it off. I don’t remember the rationale but I’d rather have some switches I can set for the situations where I don’t want it. Although I do want it on and just check my data types. And for the most part I solved this by opening and never editing in Excel. It seems to be the one hack I’ve gotten coworkers to stick with is “don’t click save” when opening large files in Excel.
the_gorilla 2y ago
This is an awful mindset and I'm tired of people acting like tools only ever have pre-defined purpose and you need a special purpose tool to do anything. Also that's a dumb analogy. Here's a better one: A knife that breaks 20% of the time when you try to cut pork, because you didn't buy a separate pork-cutting knife. I'm not doing anything nearly as special and always have dates import as numbers for whatever reason. Thanks microsoft.
- prepend 2y ago
  How a knife that breaks 0.00001% of the times because it’s used a billion times a day? If excel broke 20% of the time, I’d agree. But it rarely breaks. It’s just widely used. I’ve used Excel for decades. I just set the data types on my columns. The reason Excel does that is because the vast majority of people like it and rely on it. And changing it now will break millions of workflows. People assume their workflow is super important and worthy of software making special exceptions just for them. There’s an easy solution that people can follow now. Let’s focus on that rather than introducing a “fix” that breaks it for other people. Excel has thought about this and there’s no simple fix. Nobody is forced to use Excel.
  - the_gorilla 2y ago
    What are you talking about? You responded to the wrong person because this has nothing to do with what I said.
    - prepend 2y ago
      > Also that's a dumb analogy. Here's a better one: A knife that breaks 20% of the time when you try to cut pork, because you didn't buy a separate pork-cutting knife. Excel doesn’t break 20% of the time. It rarely breaks. I think you’re assuming that genetics is more worthwhile than the millions of other uses. Think about how widely it’s used and your analogy doesn’t work very well.

saagarjha 2y ago

Excel is a tool for general-purpose data processing. What the genetics people are doing is exactly that.

lukan 2y ago
Also it is a somewhat working solution, to ban knives in certain places, like clubs, so people don't become drunk murderers in the first place ..
jbjbjbjb 2y ago
General purpose means you’re trying to meet general purposes not every specialised purpose

bobbylarrybobby 2y ago

It's not like you have to be in genetics for excel to bite you. I once had a “business” column in a CSV with one cell set to July 11. Why? Because the business was 7/11. (I assume in a different locale it would've become November 7?) The simple solution is to do what every CSV → DataFrame library does, which is ensure columns are a homogenous type. In this case a single non-date entry in a column would be enough to treat the whole column as string.

Mistletoe 2y ago

Perhaps the first time you start excel maybe a short setup tutorial that sets the default parameters you want for every spreadsheet you create.

prepend 2y ago
I don’t think it would have much of an impact. And I hate those forced wizards and tutorials as I use excel in lots of environments. I remember Excel team writing about why they didn’t have advanced settings to turn it off. I don’t remember the rationale but I’d rather have some switches I can set for the situations where I don’t want it. Although I do want it on and just check my data types. And for the most part I solved this by opening and never editing in Excel. It seems to be the one hack I’ve gotten coworkers to stick with is “don’t click save” when opening large files in Excel.

the_gorilla 2y ago

This is an awful mindset and I'm tired of people acting like tools only ever have pre-defined purpose and you need a special purpose tool to do anything. Also that's a dumb analogy. Here's a better one: A knife that breaks 20% of the time when you try to cut pork, because you didn't buy a separate pork-cutting knife. I'm not doing anything nearly as special and always have dates import as numbers for whatever reason. Thanks microsoft.

prepend 2y ago
How a knife that breaks 0.00001% of the times because it’s used a billion times a day? If excel broke 20% of the time, I’d agree. But it rarely breaks. It’s just widely used. I’ve used Excel for decades. I just set the data types on my columns. The reason Excel does that is because the vast majority of people like it and rely on it. And changing it now will break millions of workflows. People assume their workflow is super important and worthy of software making special exceptions just for them. There’s an easy solution that people can follow now. Let’s focus on that rather than introducing a “fix” that breaks it for other people. Excel has thought about this and there’s no simple fix. Nobody is forced to use Excel.
- the_gorilla 2y ago
  What are you talking about? You responded to the wrong person because this has nothing to do with what I said.
  - prepend 2y ago
    > Also that's a dumb analogy. Here's a better one: A knife that breaks 20% of the time when you try to cut pork, because you didn't buy a separate pork-cutting knife. Excel doesn’t break 20% of the time. It rarely breaks. I think you’re assuming that genetics is more worthwhile than the millions of other uses. Think about how widely it’s used and your analogy doesn’t work very well.