Microsoft now allows users to disable automatic date conversion, which means scientists no longer have to worry about using alternative names for genes.

Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes::Microsoft now allows users to disable automatic date conversion, which means scientists no longer have to worry about using alternative names for genes.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Microsoft recently published a blog highlighting new Excel updates that allow users to disable Automatic Data Conversion.

    This comes as good news for the scientists, because in recent years they had to rename quite a few human gene names—since Excel was converting them to dates.

    There was no option to disable this automatic conversion, and that ended up affecting hundreds of scientific papers.

    It led to scientists taking hours out to manually fix the errors and restore the data.

    As the name suggests, this checkbox displays a warning message when you’re opening a .csv or .txt file with any of the optional automatic data conversions used.

    Just keep in mind that one of the ‘known issues’ with the update that Microsoft flagged in its blog is that the new conversion option doesn’t work when you’re running macros.

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