Damn near 50 years late. Did the memo that literally everyone hates this feature, and it’s spoiled many scientific studies and brought down multiple businesses just get delivered to their developers?
If someone had told me that out of context I wouldn’t even question it like “Oh, that makes sense.”
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-may-have-caused-loss-of-16000-covid-tests-in-england“The problem of Excel software (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA) inadvertently converting gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers was originally described in 2004.”
“RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession ‘2310009E13’ to ‘2.31E+13’).”
Until the day where everyone is computationally savvy and can do their processing in Python/R/Julia, it is the state of the world. As a matter of fact, HUGO agreed to rename some of the worst offender genes to Excel-friendly formats[0].
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...