Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadvertently using Excel

Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by kenjackson on Sunday April 21, 2013 @12:26PM (#5585314)

But the R&R error had almost nothing to do with Excel. The same mistake could have been made with R or pen and paper. They were careless in a way I wouldn't expect a high schooler to be careless. Not in some way that Excel did something unexpected.

It would be like blaming C# because you did foreach over collection A, rather than collection B.

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Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by ycitm on Sunday April 21, 2013 @04:02PM (#5586189)

You're right, of course. The problem in the R&R case is not with Excel itself, but that it's being used with a lack of rigour.

If it were being done in C# or R I would expect unit tests and so on. I'm not saying that would make such a mistake impossible, but programmers have processes and tools for a reason.

In the OPs case the problem actually is with excel though.

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