Scientists Overcome Excel Auto Conversion Issues That Disguise Genetic Data

In 2020, scientists decided to change the alphanumeric symbol they used to represent genes instead of trying to overcome the Excel feature that interprets their names as a date and doesn't help automatically reform them.

Recently, an Excel team member posted that the company was rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix this.

Excel's autoconversion is intended to facilitate and speed up inputs of several commonly incorporated types of data, such as numbers and dates. But for scientists who use quick abbreviations to make things easier to read, this feature could damage published and peer-reviewed data, as found in a 2016 study.

Microsoft detailed the update in a blog post this week, adding a checkbox labeled "letter conversion and continuous numbers to date."

You may be able to guess what can be activated or disabled with it. This update expands the Autoconversion Settings that the company added last year, which includes options for Excel to alert and let you load your file without automatic conversion so you can make sure nothing will be corrupted by the feature.

Microsoft's blog post adds a note, such as that Excel avoids conversion by storing data as text, which means the data may not work for future calculations. There is also a known problem where you cannot disable conversion while running macro.