Post #2083753
2026-04-23 08:14 UTC
Replies (2)
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@mhthaung@mastodon.scot 2026-04-23 16:57
@danwwilson@rstats.me I hate it turning things that *aren't* dates into dates, even when I format it as text. And I got caught out when dates formatted to my liking suddenly turned into something else around line 2000 - just as well I checked before assuming it was all ok 😬
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@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-23 13:30
@danwwilson@rstats.me It gets worse. Excel infamously will convert certain gene names (under the HUGO standard) to dates, like DEC10. For decades, you could not turn it off; I hear rumors that now there is a switch somewhere to turn it off, but nobody remembers where it is. So: I once had a dataset that biologists kept loading into Excel, despite my warnings. It came out DIFFERENTLY in the US and Germany. After much frustration, it turned out to be a gene name being converted to a different date format in each country! You will debug MANY, MANY things before you check that.