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As a data scientist I encounter problems all the time when someone opens up a CSV in excel and then saves it. A common thing that happens is that gene names like SEPT5 gets changed to a date

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I was frustrated with this problem for a long time. And, the best solution was to use xlsx :(. Also, in nodejs xlsx package has been incredibly helpful.

How does xlsx solve this? I was pretty sure i've had to deal with this same issue with xlsx files, but maybe I am misremembering...or the problem was introduced as an xls file that was then converted to xlsx.

I can see why that would be annoying but it's a tradeoff between how many people would find the automatic categorization of a cell useful vs how many would find it a nuisance. I'm not a spreadsheet wiz but I'm pretty sure it would allow you to set a column to interpret input as raw text.

Apparently science found it easier to rename some genes!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4

The problem is, MS thinks they know better than you what you want, and even if they guess it 95% right (and they don't), the rest causes so much frustration that its not worth it for audience like HN.

Its pain point with Office products since 90s, a classic example from that era (and 2000s) is doing a single newline in Word and reformatting whole 100 page document into useless mess. If they would make a clear easy option to just turn it off with 1 button, same for grammar corrections, it would make life easier for everybody. But no, MS knows better...

Yeah, I admit I find the tendency for MS products to autocorrect anything it can infuriating but I guess I'm just not their target audience which is why I stick to FOSS products and operating systems.

I tend to use org-mode's table feature and if I need to export stuff to common formats, pandoc.

But the only automatic characterization to a cell is always in a date. It has a 50 % hit rate and you always need a ritual to stop it: delete the contents of the cell, set the cell format to your desired format, insert the contents.

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