Great points.
I have a question about alternatives to excel for data input.
Following this paper I have seen a lot of 'never use Excel' tweets, but
that seems to be ignoring a key step in real world data analysis
pipelines. If data is not coming straight off a machine, such as in
ecological surveys, behavioral experiments, meta-analyses of gene names,
etc., those data need to be put into a tabular, machine readable, format
(e.g. CSV) somehow. I don't think anyone is recommending using a text
editor to do that.
Libre office calc and google sheets have many of the same autoformat
issues as Excel. (although that may be fixed in new versions of libre
office?)
I think when people say 'don't use excel', they often mean 'for
analysis', or 'for statistics'. But this paper demonstrates it is
problematic for even simple data input. I know what to recommend as
alternatives in the former cases, but not for the latter. Am I missing
good alternative options here?
Thanks,
Emily Jane
--
Emily Jane McTavish
Assistant Professor
School of Natural Sciences
University of California, Merced
5200 N. Lake Rd, Merced CA 95343
[email protected], [email protected]
On 08/26/2016 02:42 PM, Steven Haddock wrote:
I was going to post that article too, but I dug into it (read the paper), and
it is really just conversion of gene names (like SEPT5) in supplementary files.
That was reported long ago as affecting some quantifications, but I would call
it analytical errors as we have seen in the past. A bit of a tempest in a
teapot, perhaps.
Ironic twist, the paper provides a supplementary file listing all the gene-name
errors they found, posted as an Excel file.
-Steve
On Aug 26, 2016, at 14:26 , Maxime Boissonneault
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi everyone,
Some interesting content to use about how to not do science correctly with a
computer....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/
Maxime Boissonneault
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