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A comment on Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates. Parent comment

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by WorldMaker on Friday August 07, 2020 @02:24PM (#24084970)
It's also behavior that goes back to the Ancient Times and predecessors such as Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Even ancient ones will tell you if you need to enter a thing and it has to be text and only text precede it with a quote mark, ie 'MARCH1, just as you would precede a formula with =. It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades.

The clickbait headline is fun, but the real headline is more like "Scientists find it easier to rename things than learn the basics of data entry in the tools they use".

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by jackvalentine on Friday August 07, 2020 @11:17PM (#24088643)
> It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades.

Astounding, I've literally never heard of this in the 20 years or so I've been using spreadsheets. I'll be using it from now on!

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by WorldMaker on Monday August 10, 2020 @11:58AM (#24110655)
Welcome to the lucky 10,000 [1] club! It's a fascinating thing about cultural knowledge that stuff that should be taught early in using a tool, people discover anew every day. It's a useful reminder that I also wasn't disparaging the scientists for finding renaming easier than retraining. I'm sure these scientists were very familiar with the costs of learning/relearning. (ETA: Which is why my real joke was about ancient ones and how easily knowledge of the 70s/80s seems ancient and easily forgotten.)

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

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