I guess I'd just assumed that everyone was aware of Excel's penchant for converting alphanumerics to scientific notation (any numeric sequence that contains wha

I guess I'd just assumed that everyone was aware of Excel's penchant for converting alphanumerics to scientific notation (any numeric sequence that contains what looks like an exponent.) It also converts long numeric sequences (say, a 20-digit ID number) to scientific notation. Any alpha sequence that could be interpreted as a date ("02-01") of course will be converted thusly. Most of these are avoidable except the long ID number problem. Even with careful formatting as text the last time I experienced the problem Excel was still performing implicit conversions in ways that weren't immediately apparent, and that rendered the whole experiment worthless. The recent problems with bad formulas are easily solvable using the built-in auditing features, or formula arrays, or just discipline. The shortcomings reported for statistical functions ("Computational Statistics and Data Analysis", June, 2008) are another issue altogether. Jeff