Comment on Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes

• SatyrSack@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What about the title?

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  • lolcatnip@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com ⁨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.

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