{"id":181212,"date":"2016-08-29T18:49:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/29\/microflaccid-office-fail\/"},"modified":"2016-08-29T18:49:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T23:49:00","slug":"microflaccid-office-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/29\/microflaccid-office-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Microflaccid Office Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that one of the major data exchange formats for genetics is Microsoft Excel, and we have now discovered that <a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/768334\/years-of-genomics-research-is-riddled-with-errors-thanks-to-a-bunch-of-botched-excel-spreadsheets\/\">the Redmond company&#8217;s flagship spreadsheet program has been autocorrecting the data into oblivion<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">For many people, working with error-ridden spreadsheets is a way of life. This takes on added meaning for genomics researchers, who study the building blocks of life. It turns out that their work, too, is rife with dodgy spreadsheets.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">A new paper has revealed the vast extent of errors in published genomics research, which is down to an unfortunate quirk of Microsoft Excel. A trio of scientists in Australia scanned 7,500 Excel files with gene lists accompanying 3,600 papers in 18 journals over a 10-year period. One-fifth of the files had easily identified errors, which is \u201cquite striking and a little bit embarrassing,\u201d says Mark Ziemann of the Baker IDI medical research institute in Melbourne, one of the paper\u2019s co-authors.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">What happened? By default, Excel and other popular spreadsheet applications convert some gene symbols to dates and numbers. For example, instead of writing out \u201cMembrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase,\u201d researchers have dubbed the gene MARCH1. Excel converts this into a date\u201403\/01\/2016, say\u2014because that\u2019s probably what the majority of spreadsheet users mean when they type it into a cell. Similarly, gene identifiers like \u201c2310009E13\u201d are converted to exponential numbers (2.31E+19). In both cases, the conversions strip out valuable information about the genes in question.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What on earth inspired all these researchers to use what can only be described as the greasy kid stuff of analysis and data storage for this purpose?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s nucking futz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that one of the major data exchange formats for genetics is Microsoft Excel, and we have now discovered that the Redmond company&#8217;s flagship spreadsheet program has been autocorrecting the data into oblivion: For many people, working with error-ridden spreadsheets is a way of life. This takes on added meaning for genomics researchers, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[991,987,990,989,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-fail","category-genetics","category-software","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181212"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}