2016-08-26 17:31 GMT+02:00 Wade Smart <wadesmart@gmail.com>:
I tried - and a popup appers to write down my mailadress and register.
Couldn't read the text in background.
Regards
Robert
This is what I saw as well.
We seem to be discussing an entirely different issue from that which I
originally proposed. I hope Cristopher Ingraham will regard it as fair use
if I reproduce the content of the article below
:
«A surprisingly high number of scientific papers in the field of genetics
contain errors introduced by Microsoft Excel, according to an analysis
recently published in the journal Genome Biology.
A team of Australian researchers analyzed nearly 3,600 genetics papers
published in a number of leading scientific journals — like Nature, Science
and PLoS One. As is common practice in the field, these papers all came with
supplementary files containing lists of genes used in the research.
The Australian researchers found that roughly 1 in 5 of these papers
included errors in their gene lists that were due to Excel automatically
converting gene names to things like calendar dates or random numbers.
You see, genes are often referred to in scientific literature by symbols —
essentially shortened versions of full gene names. The gene "Septin 2" is
typically shortened as SEPT2. "Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3
Ubiquitin Protein Ligase" gets mercifully shortened to MARCH1
Even worse, there's no easy way to undo this automatic formatting once it
has happened. Edit -> Undo simply deletes everything in the cell. You can
try to convert the formatting from "General," the default, to "Text," which
you might expect to change it back to the original characters you enter. But
instead, changing the formatting to "Text" makes the cell contents appear as
42615 — Excel's internal numeric code referring to the date 9/2/2016.
Even more troubling, the researchers note that there's no way to permanently
disable automatic date formatting within Excel. Researchers still have to
remember to manually format columns to "Text" before you type anything in
new Excel sheets — every. single. time.
But even the genetics researchers among us are only human, and they
sometimes forget to do this. Hence, you end up with 20 percent of these
genetics papers containing preventable errors introduced by Excel.
The Australian researchers note that this problem was first identified in a
paper published more than a decade ago. "Nevertheless, we find that these
errors continue to pervade supplementary files in the scientific
literature," they write.
Genetics isn't the only field where a life's work can potentially be
undermined by a spreadsheet error. Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and
Kenneth Rogoff famously made an Excel goof — omitting a few rows of data
from a calculation — that caused them to drastically overstate the negative
GDP impact of high debt burdens. Researchers in other fields occasionally
have to issue retractions after finding Excel errors as well.
The Australian researchers note that Excel isn't the only spreadsheet
program with overly aggressive autoformatting issues — the same errors crop
up in open-source programs like LibreOffice Calc and Apache OpenOffice Calc
too.
They do note, however, that one perfectly free spreadsheet program did not
have any issues storing the gene names as typed — Google Sheets.»
Perhaps now we can get back to discussing the issue of overly aggressive
autoformatting in LibreOffice ?...
Henri
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