Nothing wrong?
Excel autoconverts values if it thinks it knows the data type of a column and Excel treats 1900 as a leap year.
Genetic researchers changed the names of genes to prevent auzoconveesion errors.
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And JavaScript autoconverts all your numbers to floats, introducing errors every time you touch them. Meanwhile most other popular languages will happily wrap your fixed-size integers around on overflow, or silently perform integer division with truncation when you don't append a decimal fraction part manually to any of the numbers.
Point being, all tools come with strange caveats that one needs to be familiar with. A nice feature of Excel is that the caveats are visible, because unlike writing code, Excel is reactive and interactive.
I mean, some of the stuff Excel does to your data is downright idiotic wrt. the common use cases, and probably exists only for the sake of backwards compatibility. But let's not pretend you don't need to pay attention if using a tool you're not proficient with.
Yes, and JS is considered a shit language by everyone who isn't a JS fanboy. What's your point?
Most other languages come with libraries for arbitrary precision arithmetic where people who know what they are doing^tm can get the right answers.
>A nice feature of Excel is that the caveats are visible, because unlike writing code, Excel is reactive and interactive.
Unlike any programming language I know I can change the results in excel by changing the presentation of the data.
The typical users of javascript ate programmers, they know that errors.
The typical users of Excel most of the time aren't aware of Excels weaknesses. And good look finding these errors in large data sets.
There is a difference between visible and lucid, especially if you do not expect errors.
>>But let's not pretend you don't need to pay attention if using a tool you're not proficient with.
Decades of experience working in Office Environments tells me many many many many many people do not pay attention period, their experience with the tool is irrelevant.
My experience also shows that inexperienced people do not know WHAT to look out for, especially in excel so they are often more susceptible to mistakes.
This really comes into play when working in larger organizations where excel workbooks are passed around from person to person, often existing for years or decades at a time where people using the workbook are separated from the person that created the workbook.
Try figuring out an excel spreadsheet created 10 years ago by people no longer with the company that several data links importing data from all over the place.....
And a band saw will happily cut off your hand if you push it into the moving blade. That's why the best practices of operating one suggest that you never keep your hands anywhere near the cutting edge.
Excel's idiosyncrasies are very much on the level of the typical productive computing tool. They are less maddening than half the featureset of C++, three quarters of the featureset of Javascript, and 110% of the featureset of bash.
Despite that, people manage to get work done using bandsaws, C++, Javascript, and the occasional shell script.
Band saws, C++, Javascript have a different user group than Excel. Most of them have been trained on the tool they use.
If Excel were a band saw, there would be a lot more people missing fingers.
The gene in question was "Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1", or MARCH1. Excel converted this to March 1st. They renamed it to MARCHF1
They renamed 27 genes in the past years to avoid Excel errors
https://www.engadget.com/scientists-rename-genes-due-to-exce...
You can find idiosyncrasies about any tool. Excel is a fine tool for 99% of use cases. Sure, it's quirky here and there, but the sheer amount of work that gets done globally in Excel should be testament enough to its value. Highlighting edge cases to bash on the tool is either myopic or intellectually dishonest
Let's consider three claims:
1) X delivers tremendous value.
2) X has some significant problems.
3) X has no problems.
You said that "[t]here's nothing wrong with Excel", and someone responded with an example of a problem that they considered significant. If we read "there's nothing wrong with Excel" as a strong claim of 3, then that's obviously a refutation of your claim. You could argue that the specific problems are not actually significant enough to rise to the level of notice. You could argue that they are not, in fact, problems at all. You could argue that you didn't, in fact, mean to make claim 3 in any strong sense (which I think is what was actually going on here - that's valid, English works that way).
You've instead interpreted it as a flawed refutation of claim 1 (and took the opportunity to demean your conversation partner). I don't think that's productive.
Excel is good at what it was developed for. Unfortunately, it is often used for other things. For example, in this case as a database. This leads to the fact that departments build solutions that work at first sight but have errors in special cases that are difficult to detect and debug.
Yes because they couldn't use their tools correctly.