According to a recent report, Microsoft’s spreadsheet software, Excel, is to blame for numerous errors in academic papers.  The report states that when the software has been used to name genes in the study of genetic science, the default settings in Excel have been converting the correct names into dates and floating point numbers.

An example given in the report is the gene name SEPT2 – Septin2 – which Excel changes to either ‘2-Sept’ or ‘2006/09/02.’ Researchers pointed out why this is a big problem, saying, “Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused. Our aim here is to raise awareness of the problem.”

Microsoft has already responded to the report telling the BBC that renaming errors can easily be fixed in the settings of Excel. “Excel is able to display data and text in many different ways. Default settings are intended to work in most day-to-day scenarios,” said a Microsoft spokesperson, adding, “Excel offers a wide range of options, which customers with specific needs can use to change the way their data is represented.”

The academics went through thousands of papers dated 2005-2015, to which Excel spreadsheets were attached, and found that 19.6 percent of them contained the aforementioned errors. It sounds like the academics are blaming Microsoft for this problem, stating, “Automatic conversion of gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers is a problematic feature of Excel software.” But as Microsoft points out, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to change the conversion settings in Excel.

The scientists also said that other spreadsheet software such as LibreOffice Calc and Apache OpenOffice Calc contained similar errors, although Google Sheets did not convert any gene names into someone’s birth date.

Remain vigilant, the academics ask of journal editors and database curators. According to Ewan Birney, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, the problem of Excel renaming things in scientific papers has been an ongoing problem since scientists started using the software. “What frustrates me is researchers are relying on Excel spreadsheets for clinical trials,” Birney said in an interview, saying that scientists should know that Excel should only be used for lightweight scientific analysis.

Photo credit: David K via Flickr