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 loktarogar on Thursday August 06, 2020 @04:52PM (#24075339)

imagine if they worked with the industry to build in a set of relatively agreed upon defaults, like turning autoformat off for dates that matched a critera. then geneticists could activate the geneticist profile and excel works as they'd expect. if they encountered a file that broke, they could turn that profile off.

that's a fairly sophisticated solution, but it's just one of many potential approaches to fixing the problem.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by mjevans on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:18PM (#24075568)

It would be way less effort to have the same exact program under a completely new name.

MS Excel

MS (names are harder than I thought / remembered) Matrix

In the back-end they'd use the same sanity and share 99% of the code, but Excel would add in the cruft / warts compatibility quirks.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by roenxi on Thursday August 06, 2020 @09:02PM (#24076980)

And they could do even better technically and have "MS Excel" be implemented on top of MS Matrix using an extension framework. That'd really firewall the cruft and encourage the core program to be flexible.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by p1necone on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:23PM (#24077753)

Less effort and they can charge twice for the same product, genius!

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by HeavyStorm on Friday August 07, 2020 @06:08AM (#24080289)

Only everybody knows what excel is, and no one knows Matrix.

And unfortunately my guess is that most Excel users don't surf HN or other geek sites.

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