Sometimes, but the situation is in reality worse than that. Excel is also used as the gold standard database/storage/interchange format of record for random shit that clinical researchers have typed in by hand whether directly or transcribed from other notes, often when that data isn't actually fundamentally tabular in nature because people really like working in grids. Even when grids hurt more than help.
A big secret in genetic research is that the MDs, grad students, project managers, and coordinators running the research programs are often not super focused on what well-structured data looks like and don't know what things like "key-value store" or "nested tree-like structure" mean, and even if they did there aren't good GUI tools for entering them anyway, and it leads to countless errors that maybe (here I speculate) they just assume will wash out as noise.
> I think the important question is why is date conversion a default?
Yes, why any kind of conversion is ever the default is a real money question.
If I could choose the tools used by the whole process involving multiple different companies and departments, hey I would! It would be python all the way down. But I was but a cog in a massive organization.
If you stay in spreadsheets these problems mostly don’t occur (that is, once data entry is squared away so that the initial spreadsheet has what you want it doesn't tend to get lost), its when you move in and out of spreadsheets via text and take the path of least resistance [0] to do the transition that the problem occurs.
[0] and to be fair, there is a lot of resistance off that path.
God I hated working in old-school engineering/manufacturing. "That's not how we do things" is the answer to everything. I
I don't do any scientific research, but I have been using jupyter as a replacement for excel since it was called the ipython notebook. I don't really use pandas all that often, I just find it easier to read and edit data in python. Though I first learned ipython added the notebook from a talk Wes McKinney gave about Pandas.
And really, even if you know python or R, are you really going to fire up a jupyter notebook, load the data, and run pandas queries every time someone in lab meeting or after a talk asks you about this gene or that gene in your data?
I think the important question is why is date conversion a default? Would it really break backwards compatibility for MS Excel users if date conversions were explicit instead of automatic? Turning that off by default would fix a lot of this.