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A comment on Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadvertently using Excel.

Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by carbocation on Sunday April 21, 2013 @10:05AM (#5584852)
I love that they published a paper on this. For most of us, this is one of those things that surprises you once and then convinces you not to use Excel for genomic work in the future, since no magic should be applied without explicit instructions from the scientist. For them, they realized that this Excel/gene name error affected almost everyone at least once, probably reasoning that journal referees would be quite sympathetic despite the otherwise bland nature of the story.

The type of auto-conversion that's going in, as mentioned in the article, is e.g., DEC1 (text) to 1-DEC (date), etc.

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Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by jforman on Sunday April 21, 2013 @12:34PM (#5585338)
I just changed the format of the column to "text" from "auto" and kept using it for my thesis work. It's too useful to bail on because of a quirk like this.
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Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by lutusp on Sunday April 21, 2013 @01:13PM (#5585471)
> I just changed the format of the column to "text" from "auto" and kept using it for my thesis work.

Yes, but for an existing spreadsheet, that won't work ex post facto. A spreadsheet in which some gene names have selectively been converted to dates won't be repaired by changing the column's data type. Such a remedy must be applied in advance of the import.

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Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by carbocation on Sunday April 21, 2013 @12:45PM (#5585380)
I was chewing through many datasets at the time, so I needed to do automation anyway (which was easier to do in R or PHP/Perl, given my background at the time). Even then, I still produced Excel output (with R scripts in an attached zip) when I wanted to share the final results with my PI and collaborators.
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