-- Registered Linux User: #480675 Registered Linux Machine: #408606 Linux since June 2005
On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 10:58 AM, M Henri Day <mhenri...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2016-08-26 17:31 GMT+02:00 Wade Smart <wadesm...@gmail.com>: >> >> > I tried - and a popup appers to write down my mailadress and register. >> > Couldn't read the text in background. >> > >> > Regards >> > >> > Robert >> >> This is what I saw as well. > > > We seem to be discussing an entirely different issue from that which I > originally proposed. I hope Cristopher Ingraham will regard it as fair use > if I reproduce the content of the article below > : > > «A surprisingly high number of scientific papers in the field of genetics > contain errors introduced by Microsoft Excel, according to an analysis > recently published in the journal Genome Biology. > > A team of Australian researchers analyzed nearly 3,600 genetics papers > published in a number of leading scientific journals — like Nature, Science > and PLoS One. As is common practice in the field, these papers all came with > supplementary files containing lists of genes used in the research. > > The Australian researchers found that roughly 1 in 5 of these papers > included errors in their gene lists that were due to Excel automatically > converting gene names to things like calendar dates or random numbers. > > You see, genes are often referred to in scientific literature by symbols — > essentially shortened versions of full gene names. The gene "Septin 2" is > typically shortened as SEPT2. "Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 > Ubiquitin Protein Ligase" gets mercifully shortened to MARCH1 > > Even worse, there's no easy way to undo this automatic formatting once it > has happened. Edit -> Undo simply deletes everything in the cell. You can > try to convert the formatting from "General," the default, to "Text," which > you might expect to change it back to the original characters you enter. But > instead, changing the formatting to "Text" makes the cell contents appear as > 42615 — Excel's internal numeric code referring to the date 9/2/2016. > > Even more troubling, the researchers note that there's no way to permanently > disable automatic date formatting within Excel. Researchers still have to > remember to manually format columns to "Text" before you type anything in > new Excel sheets — every. single. time. > But even the genetics researchers among us are only human, and they > sometimes forget to do this. Hence, you end up with 20 percent of these > genetics papers containing preventable errors introduced by Excel. > > The Australian researchers note that this problem was first identified in a > paper published more than a decade ago. "Nevertheless, we find that these > errors continue to pervade supplementary files in the scientific > literature," they write. > > Genetics isn't the only field where a life's work can potentially be > undermined by a spreadsheet error. Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and > Kenneth Rogoff famously made an Excel goof — omitting a few rows of data > from a calculation — that caused them to drastically overstate the negative > GDP impact of high debt burdens. Researchers in other fields occasionally > have to issue retractions after finding Excel errors as well. > > The Australian researchers note that Excel isn't the only spreadsheet > program with overly aggressive autoformatting issues — the same errors crop > up in open-source programs like LibreOffice Calc and Apache OpenOffice Calc > too. > > They do note, however, that one perfectly free spreadsheet program did not > have any issues storing the gene names as typed — Google Sheets.» > > > Perhaps now we can get back to discussing the issue of overly aggressive > autoformatting in LibreOffice ?... > > Henri Looks like a user problem to me. Is no one proof reading this papers before submission? Wade -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
