Auto-correct This

September 6th, 2007 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

Keeping the bashing-on-excel theme going, here’s an old paper from BMC Bioinformatics: Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics

First of all, they got a paper out of stating the obvious? That’s it. I’m going to stop blogging and submit these posts to journals low on the prestige scale.

Second of all, duuuuuh. Auto-correct makes dumb assumptions about dates and numbers, so ‘RP11 | 12E3′ gets changed to ‘RP11 | 12000′. (12E3 = 12e3 = 12×10^3 = 12,000) Awesome, huh?

Another reason why you should stay the hell away from Excel.