You'd expect scientists - people working to understand the nature of reality - to have some base competency about how they measure reality. Could have at least used a database for things like this; moreover any decent database can often import from CSV and export to CSV as well. Excel is not at fault here; the 'scientists' are.
There are probably wonderful places where that is the case, and probably several of those places use something like libreoffice which doesn't do the idiotic data conversions excel does, but they are definitely not the norm.
Why can’t we as a society make ANYTHING easier without the usual blathering on from the peanut gallery turning it into a question of one’s intelligence?
I saw a complete analysis engine written as an Excel file, which accepts and exports CSVs cleanly. It can be done.
I understand some people don't know it's possible, and some don't care, but for any competent researcher, it's expected them to master the tools they use. This is esp. true for career researchers.
As a researcher you may have to learn how to carefully dig up skulls, raise rats, handle lasers, remember not to accidentally syringe yourself with viruses etc.
Getting cut by Excel seems like part of the job and at least is hopefully less life threatening than possibly blowing yourself up or giving yourself silicosis.
That said the problem with computers is that they're pervasive, they're a moving target and often it's a case of the blind leading the blind when it comes to research. And probably more and more research groups need dedicated computer technician resources who can centralize the required computer knowledge of keeping a research group running.
But when you're writing guidelines for an entire field - as the article describes HGNC doing - you're catering to all researchers in that field: good, bad, and ugly. Plus technicians, editors, admins and anyone else that might handle the files. Given how hidden and unintuitive Excel's behaviour is here, I think what they're doing makes sense.
"=""Data Here"""
will always be treated as a string. This is also supported by Sheets, apparently.
In my current work, we deal with our user's national identity numbers quite frequently. This number is a 13 digit numerical number, that starts with your date of birth. So someone born on March 13 1989 will have a number start with 890913. People born in the aughts have "00" "01" "02" etc at the start of their ID number.
We need to frequently generate excel and csv reports that contain these numbers, and we need to ingest CSVs from other vendors that contain these numbers.
The /moment/ excel touches a CSV with these numbers in, it'll assume that column is a number, it'll strip out the preceding zeros, and it'll format the number in scientific notation. If you change the column's data type to text afterwards, then it's too late - the damage has been done and you've worst case lost data, best case you have a text column full of scientific notation numbers. You can't just open up the CSV, you need to import it, and very explicitly tell Excel how to handle this column, otherwise you mess things up.
Now, anywhere in the chain of people and other vendors sending and receiving these files, anyone who double clicks on that file and it opens up in excel and does not notice this very destructive action messes up our processes and causes unknown amounts of delays. It's the bane of my existence. This exact problem also crops up with phone numbers, where in many countries the number starts with a 0, or if it's an international number, a "+". Excel thinks the "+" makes the field a formula.
All of this because Excel is making assumptions and trying to "help", in the same way a 4 year old helps in the kitchen.
For this reason I find it incredibly frustrating to work with CSVs, because there is no "native" way for me to open the file and interact with the data in a native and intuitive way without running the risk of data being lost or edited without me noticing. I've resorted to importing the files into a local DB instance and using SQL to interact with the data, especially if the files are large.
The problems are when importing/exporting though. Even quoted numbers will lose the quote when exported to say, CSV. You need to explicitly save as quoted, and import quoted fields as text. The real issue is that these settings are not the default.
In LibreOffice (Save/Open CSV): https://imgur.com/a/ved7wgA
I'd say more unreasonable is for you to mischaracterise this comment as you have done.
Sounds like a joke, but it isn't. I know scientists who think exactly like that.