Colby Cosh: Geneticists and Microsoft were eyeball to eyeball, and the geneticists blinked

Almost all quantitative scientists use Excel at some point in their data-slinging. Young researchers might receive advice about the dangers of Excel in scientific applications, but most probably don’t. It may be taken for granted when they become grad students that they are familiar with Excel, or that they, being clever enough to know what a chondrocyte is, can learn Excel overnight.

There are workarounds for this problem , but they are laborious, and you know what humans are like. The republic of science is large, but it is badly outnumbered by the people who use spreadsheet software to keep track of appointments, budgets and fantasy baseball leagues. Microsoft wasn’t going to change. Scientists, who weren’t giving up Excel either, had to bend. The Human Gene Nomenclature Committee has abolished, by rule, DEC2 and OCT11 and their confusing brethren.

He thought of the original spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, while auditing a business class, and it was small businessmen wanting the advantages of VisiCalc who were responsible for the first takeoff of Apple Inc. The old joke is that Apple got huge selling $2,000 computers to people who wanted to run one program costing a hundred bucks.

Not sure if the article is real or an April's fool out of time. In Excel: Go to Format Cells... In the Tab Number, select Text. Solved it. Excel is already customizable, Microsoft doesn't have to modify anything now for this reason. I know this option for at least 10 years.

Good article, informative but not dry

Geneticists wanted Microsoft to change Excel so that they wouldn’t need to format spreadsheet columns? That’s a new level of lazy.

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