> One in five genetics papers contains errors because the authors were careless when using Excel
Or Excel is a remarkably easy tool to mishandle because of generally unexpected transformations it makes 'for you' automatically in an easy to miss way.
Excel (and GSheets) are tools where I think a stripped down "trust my input, I know what I'm doing" mode that doesn't try to intuit user intent would be useful.
As I type this comment and my phone miscorrects "intuit" to "Intuit," I think also Google keyboard could benefit from such a mode that only handles spelling mistakes but doesn't replace uncommon words with common brands, etc.
Yes, of course. Every cell as type "Text" so it doesnt screw up everything I paste...
The real problem is the behavior of the default "General" type, which actually means "guess at every value and ham up all my data."
I frequently have to paste in strings which consist of 0 prefixed number ids. I know very well to make sure the column is text before pasting, but other users don't always remember and frequently get their data messed up by the behavior of "General", which assumes that what you wanted was an integer and thus "helpfully" strips all the prefixed 0s.
I get all the points made (and the many more not included).
The point is that Excel works great for 99% of the people and for 99% of the use-cases. I am a heavy excel user, for my financial planning, work, etc. And it pisses me off when I see a column that should be "networkdays" (working days) becoming $ or getting decimals, but hey, you take the bad with the good.
Or Excel is a remarkably easy tool to mishandle because of generally unexpected transformations it makes 'for you' automatically in an easy to miss way.