Comments(6)
not only excelHeikki Lehvaslaiho
(30 June 2004) European Bioinformatics Institute I quickly tested a few common open source spreadsheet programs, openoffice.org calc, gnumeric and kspread, for this automatic symbol mutation ability. The following crude text table indicates if the conversions happens by default in these programs. "date" means that DEC1 type string gets converted, "float" means that RIKEN identifiers of type "2310009E13" get converted. .................."date"...."float" calc................yes........yes gnumeric........no........yes kspread.........no........yes Be careful out there! Competing interests None declared Well spottedAndrew Clegg (21 July 2004) Birkbeck One to pin up on lab walls everywhere. I shudder to think how many pieces of work this might have affected. Competing interests None declared Special Interest group on spreadsheet risksPatrick OBeirne
(26 July 2004) Eusprig The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (EUSPRIG) discusses the prevention and detection of spreadsheet errors. You can read about the emergence of the discipline of Spreadsheet Engineering and other related information at our website <a href="http://www.eusprig.org">www.eusprig.org</a>. We have just completed our fifth international conference and now have a corpus of approximately 100 peer reviewed papers in our subject domain. For more reports of spreadsheet errors, see <a href="http://www.eusprig.org/stories.htm">our stories</a> We're not specifically a group to discuss Excel bugs and workarounds, the <a href="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/excel-l.html">Excel-L list</a> is a very busy source of information on these, as well of course as the MS Knowledgebase. We are very interested in hearing from users about how you mitigate spreadsheet risks, what good practices they adopt, and so on. We are working with the ECDL Foundation for a syllabus of good practice for end users. Patrick O'Beirne, chair, Eusprig Competing interests none Good point.Carol Bult (27 July 2004) The Jackson Laboratory The article raises a very good point. I've experienced similar behavior in excel for other data types. I would add that it is always a good idea to carry along a unique numeric database id along with gene names/symbols. Database accession ids may be less likely to be munged by Excel (unless the ids are alpha-numeric!) and since they are usually unique and permanent they can be used to restore and/or update lists of gene names/symbols (which change all of the time). Competing interests No competing interests 19 probe sets in Affymetrix's human U133Plus2.0Chao Lu (28 July 2004) Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto A good point. Many people did not pay attention to this 'small' error. Here is a list of 19 probe sets with errors in their gene symbol (June 23, 04 annotation, Affymetrix) when opened in Excel: 1570394_at ===> 1-Sep 200902_at ===> 15-Sep 208999_at ===> 8-Sep 209000_s_at ===> 8-Sep 212413_at ===> 6-Sep 212414_s_at ===> 6-Sep 212415_at ===> 6-Sep 212698_s_at ===> 10-Sep 213666_at ===> 6-Sep 214298_x_at ===> 6-Sep 214720_x_at ===> 10-Sep 220781_at ===> 1-Dec 221129_at ===> 2-Apr 223362_s_at ===> 3-Sep 225814_at ===> 1-Sep 226627_at ===> 8-Sep 227034_at ===> 10-Sep 227552_at ===> 1-Sep 233632_s_at ===> 1-Sep Competing interests None declared |
|
| 
|
 |  | Log on / register Feedback | Support | My details |
on Google Scholar
|
|
| © 1999-2008 BioMed Central Ltd unless otherwise stated |