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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

This headline is quite unfair. If Excel didn’t try to normalize data that was being input, how many more errors would there be in these and other datasets? Anyway, no automated tool is going to make the right choices in every case. The researchers and journals have a responsibility to take care to check and clean their own datasets. They blame this class of errors on Excel. But if they aren’t catching such obvious issues (like a gene name field that has a date datatype and doesn’t match any gene names) what about all the errors that aren’t Excel’s “fault” but are much more subtle?

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I think it's clear that this is the researchers' fault.

Did the researchers license Excel for genetic work? This seems like a major error to treat your gene data as dates.

Excel doesn't treat gene data as dates, it treats text input in certain formats as dates unless you tell it not to by explicitly specifying the data type. Scientists have a whole constellation of tools to choose from--various spreadsheets, Jupyter notebooks, R programs, custom apps written by colleagues, etc.--and each one will have a certain feature set that will have to be used properly to avoid errors. Excel is not "buggy" in this respect.

I will say, though, that I have been repeatedly surprised when creating large, complex models for others in Excel at how easy it is to have a bug in your "code" that isn't obvious. In this respect, it's a bit like JavaScript's philosophy of "don't crash or sound an alarm, just make your best guess and keep going." For simple things, this works fine, but for anything complex, I really prefer more "bondage and discipline" from the platform, so my potential errors are pointed out rather than forgiven.

I didn't expect Excel to understand gene data. I expected that scientists would have used an appropriate tool for gene data.

>complex models for others in Excel

It's best not to do that except in cases of emergency, I think. If you are going to get complex, SQL may be a much better solution, or something else.

>Septin-2 is commonly shortened to SEPT2

Why not short it to "7-2"? Or even just "5"?!

The whole thing smells like good old Microsoft bashing and/or poorly disguised advert for Google Sheets.

I think we should avoid making accusations of a conspiracy to advertise a product in a published paper without good evidence for that conspiracy.

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