Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-fixes-excel-feature-that-forced-scientists-to-1850949443
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.
Microsoft fixed something and made their products better!? I don’t believe you.
What does excel and incels have in common? Confusing things for a date.
My dad uses excel too.
I thought setting a column to string only was already possible.
You could already, after the fact, and per cell.
If you’re importing 100,000 rows in, the damage to your data is already done by the time you’re at the step where you can set the field to not convert.
It is, I've used that to prevent automatic removal of leading zeroes when reading the values of bytes.
Based on the article it seems like it's just a matter of not having to spend the time (and mental overhead) of doing that for all required columns and never slipping up on it (now just set and forget).
So did i. Format cell(s) > data type (or something) then just seleect text, or custom or whatever.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft recently published a blog highlighting new Excel updates that allow users to disable Automatic Data Conversion.
This comes as good news for the scientists, because in recent years they had to rename quite a few human gene names—since Excel was converting them to dates.
There was no option to disable this automatic conversion, and that ended up affecting hundreds of scientific papers.
It led to scientists taking hours out to manually fix the errors and restore the data.
As the name suggests, this checkbox displays a warning message when you’re opening a .csv or .txt file with any of the optional automatic data conversions used.
Just keep in mind that one of the ‘known issues’ with the update that Microsoft flagged in its blog is that the new conversion option doesn’t work when you’re running macros.
The original article contains 299 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I worked in a company where excel files were used as a database and then read through JavaScript to be processed…
At least it’s not a giant macro
Took long enough. Now let’s see if they can give an option to turn off Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility stuff like single quotes starting a cell being hidden as markup.
I had this problem all the time in a former job.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
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NoSpiritAnimal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have a spreadsheet that has been going for 20 years, across 2 companies, and hundreds of people.
Thousands and thousands of lines, going back like an ice core sample.
“What’s this layer?”
“Oh that’s when Terry worked here”
prole@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I read this meme several times trying to figure out what is supposed to be funny about it… Then I realized it’s from Friends and based on a “joke” from that show. No wonder it wasn’t funny.
Pottsunami@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Who shit in your cheerios?
SatyrSack@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Nowhere here is it implied that they were using it instead of a database. They could run into this issue whether or not they were properly using Excel for what it is for.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
It’s a well known phenomenon. The title of the article even alludes to it.