Microsoft Excel Error: Did The Software Really Cause Errors In A Gene Study?

Researchers blamed Microsoft's Excel for errors found in their academic papers on genomics. The researchers called Microsoft out and claimed that the spreadsheet software automatically converts the names of genes into dates.

In a report by BBC News, researchers of a genomic study said that Excel automatically converts specific gene names into dates. Examples of which are the gene symbols SEPT2 (Septin 2) were found to be altered to "September 2" and "MARCH1" gene becomes "1-Mar". However, Microsoft, which released the first version of the software in 1985, explained that the gene renaming errors can be solved if users make necessary changes in the application settings.

"Excel is able to display data and text in many different ways. Default settings are intended to work in most day-to-day scenarios," a spokeswoman for the corporation told the BBC. "Excel offers a wide range of options, which customers with specific needs can use to change the way their data is represented," she added.

The paper also noticed that this problem has been identified for over a decade, but has remained prevalent over time. The trio, Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren and Assam El-OstaEmai, of the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Australia studied 35,175 Excel tables linked to 3,597 scientific papers published between the years 2005 and 2015 and discovered errors in "987 supplementary files from 704 published articles."

"Of the selected journals, the proportion of published articles with Excel files containing gene lists that are affected by gene name errors is 19.6 per cent."  Another spreadsheet software that had the same conversion problem, according to the researchers was LibreOffice Calc or Apache OpenOffice Calc. However, the systematic error was not present in Google Sheets, mspoweruser.com reported.

Meanwhile, Ewan Birney, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, does not blame Excel and told the BBC: "What frustrates me is researchers are relying on Excel spreadsheets for clinical trials." The Excel gene renaming issue has been known among the scientific community for more than a decade, Birney added. Theregister.co.uk also reported that Birney recommended the program should only be considered for "lightweight scientific analysis".

Assam El-Osta, one of the paper's three researchers said that the errors were specifically found on the supplemental data sheets of academic studies. He also said that the supplemental pages contained "important supporting data, rich with information," and added that resolving these errors was "time-consuming".

The Baker IDI claimed that the first time the scientific community discovered Excel's automatic renaming of certain genes was in 2004. Since then the problem has "increased at an annual rate of 15%" over the past five years.