A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.
"=""Data Here"""
will always be treated as a string. This is also supported by Sheets, apparently.
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.
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?