An alarming number of scientific papers contain autoformatting spreadsheet errors Rather concerning if these errors get to alter such important outcomes. The errors are not unique to Microsoft Excel and similar issues have been spotted with LibreOffice as well as OpenOffice. Quite interesting that one free spreadsheet application does not do this, and the article also recommends that scientists rather considering using serious programs and languages that were built for statistical research, like R and Python. Even more troubling, the researchers note that there's no way to permanently disable automatic date formatting within Excel. Researchers still have to remember to manually format columns to "Text" before you type anything in new Excel sheets — every. single. time. But even the genetics researchers among us are only human, and they sometimes forget to do this. Hence, you end up with 20 percent of these genetics papers containing preventable errors introduced by Excel. See http://ift.tt/2borERa
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