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

Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by maxerickson on Sunday April 21, 2013 @01:13PM (#5585470)
The point of my comment was mainly that "by rewriting data cells in spreadsheets" is a poor way to describe the bad import behavior of Excel. A CSV is an ill specified structured text file, not a spreadsheet (most spreadsheets have some sort of type information for each cell, who knows whether it is intentional and accurate and so forth, but it is there).

In that context, "in an Excel file" meant "in a native Excel file".

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Re:Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadver... by lutusp on Sunday April 21, 2013 @01:58PM (#5585657)
> most spreadsheets have some sort of type information for each cell ...

Yes, but the problem is that, without some knowledge and care on the part of the operator, the data type will be established during the import, not in advance, and on a cell-by-cell basis.

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