Mastodawn

The year is 2004. Zeeberg et al warn using spreadsheets to analyse microarray data causes gene name errors.

The year is 2016. My team warns using spreadsheets to analyse RNA-seq data causes gene name errors.

The year is 2021. My team warns that the spreadsheet problem is actually worse than we estimated before.

The year is 2026, many "high impact" journal articles doing expensive single cell sequencing have gene name errors among other statistical flaws.

Sigh.

It's frustrating how (a) Microsoft just CANNOT fix Excel not to mangle data like this, and (b) biologists just CANNOT learn not to use Excel.

@mdziemann i know right! that's why we used Perl in 2003 :)

@mdziemann especially as there is a tool specifically designed to work just as easily and better: https://datavzrd.github.io/

@mdziemann don't worry, AI will fix it! 😂