this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes (gizmodo.com)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes::Microsoft now allows users to disable automatic date conversion, which means scientists no longer have to worry about using alternative names for genes.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a well known phenomenon. The title of the article even alludes to it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about the title?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Read the article. IMHO scientists were having problems because they were using it for a task it is ill suited for. The kind of program that is designed for storing large amounts of data and preventing accidental corruption of it is a database.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think scientists would use Excel more for finding out information with their data, not for storing it. You know like looking for trends and plotting graphs and whatnot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think they use it for both. They end up using it as a database because they're familiar with it from doing data analysis. I've also heard of much more egregious examples, like a school using a giant Excel spreadsheet to track the applications of potential students. Need to track up to three references for each student? Make three of each column related to a reference! It's a really gross way of storing denormalized data without any of the ACID properties databases guarantee.