Emily, I think a lot of the auto conversion can be dealt with using the data validation tools in excel. I've used it fairly successfully to constrain data entry in Excel files that are being shared across many people with a large variance in data and computer skills. At this point, Excel is really the only option (until we have time to set up a database with online data entry).
For the gene example, you could set up a drop down list of acceptable gene names. Cheers, Jeff ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2016 15:02:06 -0700 From: Emily Jane McTavish <[email protected]> To: Software Carpentry Discussion <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Discuss] Excel errors.... Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed 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] ***************************************
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
