I would expect dates to show up in large datasets pasted into excel orders of magnitude more often than genes. For the people who use excel, autoformatting is overwhelmingly the desired default behavior.

> For the people who use excel, autoformatting is overwhelmingly the desired default behavior.

Seriously? Also for pasted series? Also when the rest of the column doesn't match?

Let's say you have 100,000 rows of data, and in a column all but 3 of those values look like dates. In a real office, which is more likely: that you are working on some set of data that just happens to look like a date 99.997% of the time but isn't a date, or some guy mis-entered or modified 0.003% of the data?

The I-want-to-put-data-in-my-table-which-closely-resembles-an-incredibly-common-format-but-is-problematic-if-mistaken-for-that-format-oh-and-I-can-not-be-bothered-to-google-how-to-turn-off-autoformat niche is not very large. I don't work for microsoft and I don't have copies of user data, but I would be willing to bet my entire life savings that over 95% of the time someone pastes a series which appears to have mismatched data types in the columns, the series actually does have mismatched data types in the columns.

Sounds a bit contrived in this context.

I'd rather think of 100 000 rows where some of them looks like like a date.