Excel

[Kraven VanHelsing]

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/...el_gene_names/

"There are lots of better alternatives," Neil Saunders, a data scientist who sounded the alarm about genetic mishaps with Excel back in 2012, told The Register today. "But Excel is on their computers and they feel familiar with it, even if they can't actually use it properly. Biologists in particular are reluctant to invest time in learning programming skills."

[...]

"It's often pointed out that the problem is entirely avoidable, by setting Excel column type when importing CSV files," Saunders told us. "But no one does this – they just click on a file name, it opens in Excel – boom, the damage is done." He blames Microsoft for the blunders. "Really I think the issue is that non-explicit auto-conversion of data types is a bad default software behavior."

"Personally I think that changing the gene symbols is not a great solution," Saunders told us. "But given that Microsoft won't change its default Excel behavior and 16-plus years of attempts to educate biologists on the issue have failed, I suppose it is a practical solution."

e persino dall'articolo di verge nel primo post

There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns. Even then, a scientist might fix their data but export it as a CSV file without saving the formatting. Or, another scientist might load the data without the correct formatting, changing gene symbols back into dates. The end result is that while knowledgeable Excel users can avoid this problem, it’s easy for mistakes to be introduced.