
Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors - okket
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37176926
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dzdt
The article is so annoying! I am pretty damn sure excel doesn't intentionally
have any gene-renaming features, nor even has any concept of gene. So what are
the scientists doing? Forgetting to put quotes on some data that is gene-
names, and having it interpretted as function names or dates or something?

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sp332
Yes. By default, if you type SEPT2 into a cell, Excel will store it as a date
type and change the text representation to 2-Sep. The article is slightly
wrong, and I think the paper itself gives a good summary at the top.
[http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s130...](http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7)

