Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes::Microsoft now allows users to disable automatic date conversion, which means scientists no longer have to worry about using alternative names for genes.
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I think they use it for both. They end up using it as a database because they’re familiar with it from doing data analysis. I’ve also heard of much more egregious examples, like a school using a giant Excel spreadsheet to track the applications of potential students. Need to track up to three references for each student? Make three of each column related to a reference! It’s a really gross way of storing denormalized data without any of the ACID properties databases guarantee.
