So called Scientists use Excel?

hmm, I only know excel and some javascript, what should be the next step in my master plan

they need to git gud then

you didn't read shit, it's clearly both in the blurb OP linked and in the abstract of the article

>Biologists
There's your problem.

>The researchers claimed the problem is present in "approximately one-fifth of papers" that collated data in Excel documents.
>They found 704 of those papers contained gene name errors created by Excel.
>Excel's automatic renaming of certain genes was first cited by the scientific community back in 2004, the Baker IDI study claims. Since then the problem has "increased at an annual rate of 15%" over the past five years.

How, HOW does this even happen?

99.99% of the human race is literally way too stupid to learn how to program. Excel is all they have when they need to put words and numbers somewhere that isn't a piece of paper. There's a reason why everyone has access to everything they need to write code but almost no one ever does. It's the mental equivalent of professional athletics, everyone has everything they need already to run around a track but almost no one will end up in the Olympics.

Yes Excel is absolute shit even though it's easy to use. Microsoft became complacent sometime around Office 2000 - 2003 and stopped improving the software beyond adding things like The Ribbon and Flat Design and patching up thousands of security flaws.

Do a side by side comparison of Office 2000 and Office 2013 for practical differences, there is very little that is different beyond the way things look.

They are running out of fake improvements that they want to go the Adobe route and start charging yearly subscription because they know that there is no reason to buy a new version.

>The study also claimed that the Excel conversion problem was present in other spreadsheet software, such as Apache OpenOffice Calc.

>99.99% of the human race is literally way too stupid to learn how to program

HAHAHAHAHA, no. CS majors are just incredible stupid.

>support.office.com/en-us/article/Stop-automatically-changing-numbers-to-dates-452bd2db-cc96-47d1-81e4-72cec11c4ed8
>Microsoft Excel is preprogrammed to make it easier to enter dates. For example, 12/2 changes to 2-Dec. This is very frustrating when you enter something that you don't want changed to a date. Unfortunately there is no way to turn this off. But there are ways to get around it.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office
>Initial release 19 November 1990; 25 years ago

>Be shitty proprietary software company
>Can't improve admittedly frustrating """""""feature""""""" after 25 years of complaints

Bravo

I was just thinking about this. Have to gitgud at Excel for one of my classes next term, and I feel like a whore for it.

Also: have any of you ever met anyone who's used Microsoft Access? What were they like?

Excel is good for analyzing data rapidly and qualitatively before you do a more mathematically rigorous and time consuming analysis with some other method.

At least, that's how my lab uses it.

...it's an existing option and has been for years. cell format. right click.

>>Initial release 19 November 1990; 25 years ago

On that subject, a couple of weeks ago I crashed Word by attempting to insert an image. Recovered the document, minus an entire page.

25 years. Countless versions. Of a word processing program. And yet.

I've altogether refused to use Excel for pretty much anything in my life other than organizing a spreadsheet for my prof's students' grades. The vast majority of undergrads worship Excel, and I could never figure out why. Every time I open an MSOffice application, I want to kill myself trying to sift through all the hand-holding ergonomic bullshit.

I use SAGE or Numpy for array number crunching, Mathematica for graphing functions, and Origin for stats graphics.

>The vast majority of undergrads worship Excel
Sounds like liberal arts students and not STEM students

>At least, that's how my lab uses it.
your lab needs to hear the good word of R

Was true in physics too until I left and just stuck with math. Actually wasn't too bad in the math dept. since a number of classes required us to learn Mathematica or SAGE in the first place.

I'm in engineering and its split between people who use excel and people who self taught themselves MATLAB

>HAHAHAHAHA

Yeah, I know, no one ever believes me when I explain this, but there's a reason why even among highly educated geneticists 1/5 of their papers taken at random were found to have Excel specific autoformatting errors. These are just the ones that had errors, you know even more of them used Excel and knew well enough to set the field format to text before pasting their shit in. Any professional academic researcher in the hard sciences who's using Excel to manage their data is not going to know how to program. If they did, they'd be using a proper relational database.

Completely anecdotal, but I started out working out of school knowing nothing about programming. I got paid less than $20,000 / year, which was around the same everyone else I knew from work made. A few years later I learned how to quasi-automate some data entry tasks using desktop macros. Then I started working with our company's proprietary reporting software. Then I moved on to making SQL server connections through MS Access. Then I started using SQLCMD to connect through batch files. Then I started working with SQL server management studio. The I got into Python and C# and built some actual I/O automation programs and desktop applications. Then I got into ASPX and did web applications and API integration for our different vendor company relationships. Then I got into C++ and wrote a backpropagation network generation platform and an interpreter for a statistics / machine learning domain specific programming language. And now I make over $100,000 / year at the same company and don't even show up to work most days. My co-workers who are still at this company with me are still doing data entry and call center work and still make about the same. They had access to learn and do everything I learned and did. The only difference was they couldn't figure it out.

Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make.

I might not be being fair; I only stuck with physics for two years and perhaps it wasn't sufficiently weeded out by that point.

Engineering at Devry? Every good school has an intro to Matlab freshman year.

>tfw no biology experiments can be reproduced
>tfw biologists make basic statistical errors
>tfw the medical field is owned by Big Pharma anyways
>tfw

It's even worse when you look at psychiatry, which constitutes big pharma's biggest sellers by far, and which is based entirely on non-biological checkbox surveys and the influence of qt 3.14 pharma sales reps convincing psychs to put eight year olds on massive quantities of antipsychotics because they now also count as "antidepressants."

>>tfw no biology experiments can be reproduced
no
>>tfw biologists make basic statistical errors
no
>>tfw
no

bait/10

butthurt biologist detected

not an argument

didnt have to be, was just an observation

excel can be a reasonable package when used properly, everything has its time and place

e.g. large proportion of top-tier coral reef research uses excel to some extent

however, the big boys use R

>99.99% of the human race is literally way too stupid to learn how to program.
>implying programming is difficult
>implying it's not just that excel is comparatively much faster and simpler

>>tfw biologists make basic statistical errors
>no
Biologists have 0 knowledge of maths

>coworker asks me some medium complexity problem that would take half an hour of table wrangling and manual data editing in excel
>do it in five minutes with a couple lines of R
God I love not being limited by excel anymore

>however, the big boys use R

biofag here, can confirm that R is almost always the superior choice. Once you put the time in and become fluent in the language, there's barely any reason to use Excel again for data manipulation.

I heard they're teaching R in undergrad now in some universities, so I guess people are finally starting to move away from Excel.

case in point: I use R but am still forced to use excel for some assignment submissions. final semester.

from biofag

fucking kek

>what are quantitative statistics
>what is stage based modelling
>what is MSY

fucking what user

What's the programmer's equivalent of excel?

>a scientist blaming a software he willingly uses instead of his stupidity

Excel is used by the vast majority of scientists who aren't programming autists.

Php

That just proves that Biologists are mostly dumb.

>completes his work in 5 mins
>gets given more work by his boss

its like you programmers want to be cucked

this.

Biologist are like "I use a lab coat, I'm a scientist, broh"

We were taught R in undergrad at my uni 7 years ago ...in environmental science no less. Australia btw

how much cringe can one thread have? It might be true that this board is full of underage cancer after all

use LaTeX, dude

I'm writing my thesis, and showed to my wife how to do margins for books, including bound and shit. She cannot believe how simple it is

...

you would have a sperg attack if you knew how many of us actually dont even wear labcoats

I am surprised by the amount of idiots wearing lab coats calling themselves "scientist"

>implying programming isn't difficult

If programming wasn't difficult, you wouldn't get paid tons of money to do it because everyone could do it and it would have an equivalent value to being able to perform customer service or janitorial work. And that aside, everyone would program for a lot of other personal benefit reasons if it were something everyone could learn. You don't need a comp sci degree to get paid lots of money to code ether. If you figure out how to code and can actually accomplish things people want, you will get paid lots of money regardless of your education. This is something everyone already has everything they need if they want to start doing it, which means the extremely large number of people who don't code are not coding because they aren't able to figure it out.

butthurt biologists detected

>which means the extremely large number of people who don't code are not coding because they aren't able to figure it out
no. you're the kind of dickhead that thinks people that don't use arch linux are dumb because they can't figure it out, when really it's just much easier to use windows. anyone can file their taxes, but many people pay others to do it for them, because they value their time at more than what it costs to pay someone to do it for them.

Look, the problem is when deaing with very large amounts of data even insignificant rounding errors start to really play havoc on your results.

Excel is fantastic for a majority of things but when you're dealing with big data you want to look elsewhere

I was taught to use R in my stage 2 bioinformatics class

is it because "mathematicians" will never be scientists?

Biofags btfo

most of the time i don't even wear gloves

one time an EHS guy told me i should wear pants instead of shorts and for some reason i told him i didn't own any

Crashing this plane

>myself and many of my colleagues often go barefoot except when in the lab

those signs about 'enclosed footwear' being necessary? yeah they are for us...

...

>I's sad that I was able to predict that one of you man children would post "butt hurt biologists detected." That say's alot about the average maturity and intellect of "scientist" on Veeky Forums. Calling you college students would even be too much of a courtesy.
Biologists use programs like Logger Pro and Prism. I used one of them myself and know people who have used them in genetics and neurobiology.
Fuck off.

>matlab
>SPLUS
>SPSS
>R

all standard too

this

I really don't understand why anyone wouldn't be using R. It's pretty fucking simple once you understand its language, which isn't even that hard.
I never took a single programming class in my life before and still manage to use that program. Free Guides and packages everywhere, hell even tutorials..

>install MySQL
>run aggregate query without group by
>no error

Stop telling people to use this garbage you fucking failure.

Anyone on here tried FEATHER?

It's supposed to allow tabular data to be transported between Python and R, and since it's coded in binary, it's supposed to be hella fast.

blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/feather-package.html

I heard about it on Data Skeptic, seems pretty dope

What the fuck is wrong with you? This is like the third person in this thread who didn't read the article and wrongly assumed it was a rounding problem.
READ BEFORE POSTING YOU RETARDS

But why, most statistics can just be done in Python. For the few standard subroutines missing you could just pipe output from one program to the other.

>Wants to do science
>Does not know how to code
Into the fucking trash it goes.