The new settings come after years of complaints from the scientific community about Excel incorrectly reading human genes as dates.
a new setting to Excel, which addresses a years-long automatic reformatting problem that could ruin scientific data.on 19 October 2023, Excel team product manager Chirag Fifadra revealed the Automatic Data Conversion settings the company had been testing since last year were now broadly available in Excel for Windows and MacOS.
“So, we have now given you the ability to change Excel’s default behavior and disable specific types of automatic data conversions as needed.” Truncate numerical data to 15 digits of precision and convert to a number that may be displayed in scientific notation, if needed.Convert a continuous string of letters and numbers to a date.The last option is great news for the scientific community, which has complained for years about Excel incorrectly reading human genes as dates.
Each of the tens of thousands of human genes is given a name and symbol in the form of an alphanumeric code.Typing this into an Excel cell will automatically convert it to 1 March.