Re: [LUG] Excel mangles genes draft letter

[Simon Waters <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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John Daragon wrote:
| On Tuesday 20 July 2004 12:34, Adrian Midgley wrote:
|
|>On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 08:31:03 +0100, Carl <cjm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
|>
|>>It makes absolutely no difference to the end user whether or not the
|>>source code for Excel is available.
|>
|>Can you prove that?
|
| I doubt that this is refutable. But, given that the
idiot^h^h^h^h^huser didn't
| bother to read the manual (where this behaviour *and* how to defeat it is
| clearly documented), I'd say that the probability of him/her reading the
| *source* tended to zero.

Reading the source is a straw man argument.

In this case it is "users" (many) being confused by two aspects of the
Excel interface.

The authors wrote programs to workaround this in Excel, had they used a
free software spreadsheet with such interface issues they could have
distributed an improvement, rather than distribute extra sticky plasters
to manage. My dislike of the concept of managing patches is only
exceeded by my dislike of managing third party patches.

| This has *nothing* to do with .......
| or trying to kid the world that software has no cost.

I don't think anyone was trying to kid the world on that issue.

However the true cost of software is a lot closer to zero if you share
it. Indeed it is effectively as close to zero as makes no difference if
you only want to do things that have been done by people who share.

One has to wonder how many times over the world's geneticists have paid
for the cost of developing Excel, to end up with a tool that many of
them are finding difficult to use.

|>Is there any general principle that can be drawn from it?
|
| I think not.

Check your program (including spreadsheets) does what you think it does.

My boss just discovered another case of Excel disappearing into an
infinite loop(?) on certain big but "simple" spreadsheets. Obviously it
was more complex than he thought, unlike me he is still capable of thought.

|>Does it handle the data in question in the same damaging way as Excel, or
|>in the non-damaging way as does Gnumeric?  That would appear to be another
|>experiment in the same series.
|
| Excel doesn't damage data. It merely transforms it in this case, and in a
| manner that the manual tells you it will. The idea that this user
couldn't
| reconstruct his or her original strings (or whatever) from the data that
| Excel holds is frankly ludicrous, and, I suspect, just another facet
of his
| or her failure to understand the tool.

Urm no - the irreversible changes to the data, that IS as documented.

What you are looking for here is a "backup". Saving your raw data for
later review/checking - that is good science, although it can get very
expensive very quickly - especially where satellite based instruments
are concerned in my experience.
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