Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes

gizmodo.com

26 pointsblahedo10 comments

This is one of the main reasons I don't use Microsoft products. I hate that they insist on changing what I type as I type. I hate having to keep turning automatic formatting in word and I can't stand that vs code keeps popping up distracting bubbles.

I turn them off but they don't seem to stay off. I wish they'd just step aside and let me work

+1,000,000

Even edge is just Chrome with popups.

stop using MS products, then?

I'd kind of like to be a fly on the wall at the business when a billion dollars disappear at the intersection of wrong settings in Automatic Data Conversion and decade-old legacy data (manual) processing.

> Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes

That was a bug. Converting every damn number to dates is not and has never been a feature. Importing csv or text files was always an exercise in pain because of this bug disguised as a feature.

I get really surprised every time it comes up, that something else hasn't come up, like Access or Libreoffice Base, that people in non-finance fields organically gathered around because of it being:

- Easier to use

- Less likely to eat your data

- Less limitations (although we missed taking advantage of the limited columns issue in Excel)

I understand the concept that Excel is easy to get started with and Access wasn't provided with the lower options of Office, but it still seems odd.

Libreoffice has trouble with big datasets. Since some time, Excel is the only one able to process big spreadsheets.

I hate Excel and i would love to see LibreOffice being used, but in this case Excel is better.

Access was usually a distinctive option of the Office package. And the interface was strange.

Completely agree. It just feels strange that everyone keeps using a spreadsheet that's done everything from destroying economies because of miscalculating whether austerity was bad, to screwing up multiple scientific papers in different ways; and that nothing better has come along.

> Remove leading zeros and convert to a number

This is stupid. If a leading zero was input, it was intended to be there and probably isn't a number. Been burned by this many times.

> Keep first 15 digits of long numbers and convert to scientific notation

This is stupid. If scientific notation was intended, somebody would have input it that way. This unnecessarily discards data. Been burned by this many times.

> Convert digits surrounding the letter "E" to a number in scientific notation

This actually makes sense I think?

> Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date

This is fairly stupid - dates ought to have delimiters between things (and a year!). Been burned by this a few times.

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