07.26.04

Research irreversibly damaged by Excel

Posted in General at 8 am

I have had this *exact* same problem over and over again in Excel: Genetic research irreversibly damaged by Excel autoformatting.

When you open a file in Excel, it automagically attempts to convert some numerical entries into Dates or Times. The Only way I’ve found to get around it is to open the file in a plain text editor, (if it is Tab delimited), Copy, open a new spreadsheet in Excel, select all of the cells in the sheet, tell them that they are all ‘text’ ahead of time using the formatting palette and then Paste the data into place.

Otherwise you get horrible horrible screwed up data. Another reason why I like I like Dumb software and hate software that tries to be ‘smart’.

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