Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by otherme123 on Thursday August 06, 2020 @12:11PM (#24072308)

LibreOffice AND Google Docs fall in the same exact spot than Excel here. Try it. Type "SEPT-2" or "SEPT2" in any of them and see what happens.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by erAck on Thursday August 06, 2020 @03:16PM (#24074432)

LibreOffice Calc: "SEPT-2" is a date, "SEPT2" is not.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by mcv on Thursday August 06, 2020 @04:49PM (#24075320)

Do they change the data or only the representation? Several people here argued that LibreOffice preserved the original data, which would be a pretty fundamental difference in this context.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by erAck on Thursday August 06, 2020 @07:03PM (#24076335)

SEPT-2 is changed to date (that is how all major spreadsheet software works if an input is accepted as date), SEPT2 is kept as text as entered.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by erAck on Thursday August 06, 2020 @07:07PM (#24076363)

And actually it depends on the locale you work in whether SEPT is a valid month abbreviation or not.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by wesleywt on Friday August 07, 2020 @04:43AM (#24079763)

Some biologist will write a gene as Sept-2. Its best to change the name so that its not a date.

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