This article was published in 2004. It was still causing problems in 2012 [1], when a paper published in the prestigious journal Cell had a few gene names writt

This article was published in 2004. It was still causing problems in 2012 [1], when a paper published in the prestigious journal Cell had a few gene names written as dates [2]. Even the GEO [3] had problems with this , according to [1]. The culprit is automatic type conversion, which the user has to understand in order to avoid it. Usually, the way around this problem is to format the columns as text before the data is entered. But it is much harder to work with someone else's munged data or spreadsheet, especially when it is in the form of a .csv file. Even though there is an RFC standard for CSV files, RFC 4180 [4], it is a description of how different editors handle CSV files, and not a prescriptive definition. [1] https://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel-for-biological-data/ https://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel... [2] https://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel-for-biological-data/ https://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel... [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GPL13667 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GPL13667 [4] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180