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• @weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-08 19:41

  @ColinTheMathmo @vpunt Oh, I have *so* many battle scars from this! Imagine my frustration when Excel took gene expression data and converted gene names like DEC10 to dates, then munged the dates DIFFERENTLY, depending on whether the data was last saved by American or European colleagues! (True story, actually seen in the wild.) Some genes have actually been renamed because this error in Excel is so damn persistent. In 2021, about 30% of papers contain mangled gene names in supplementary data: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4 Same in 2016, multiple sources: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7 https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-papers-contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel This has been going on for decades, since AT LEAST 2004, which is when it bit me: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1471-2105-5-80 You can't get Microsoft to fix it, since it's not a "business problem". You can't get biologists to stop using Excel, becaues it's a "bioinformatics problem". Ultimately, you CAN get the international standards body that assigns HUGO symbols to human genes to CHANGE 27 GENE NAMES to bulletproof them against Excel mishegoss: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates At that point, Microsoft was sufficiently embarrassed to put in a switch in Excel to turn off data conversion (apparently all of it, not just genes & dates). I was retired at that point, but I will bet (small amounts of) actual money that ALMOST NO BIOLOGIST KNOWS HOW TO TURN THAT SWITCH OFF, so the problem would have persisted had the genes not been renamed.

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