[R] Excel

[J.delasHeras at ed.ac.uk]

Similar story with gene names.
I have a few genes such as SEP7, SEP10... if the file is touched by  
Excel, they're gone!
I can avoid using Excel, but I can't be sure that when I receive a  
file from somebody else it will not contain that sort of errors.
The first thing I do when I get a new Office version is disable all  
teh automatic BS that it tries to do to "help" you. Incredibly, the  
behaviour with dates in Excel cannot be disabled!

Jose

Quoting Moshe Olshansky <m_olshansky at yahoo.com>:

> This is very consistent with Microsoft's philosophy:
> they know better than you what you want to do.
>
> --- David Scott <d.scott at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>
>>
>> A common process when data is obtained in an Excel
>> spreadsheet is to save
>> the spreadsheet as a .csv file then read it into R.
>> Experienced users
>> might have learned to be wary of dates (as I have)
>> but possibly have not
>> experienced what just happened to me. I thought I
>> might just share it with
>> r-help as a cautionary tale.
>>
>> I received an Excel file giving patient details.
>> Each patient had an ID
>> code in the form of three letters followed by four
>> digits. (Actually a New
>> Zealand National Health Identification.) I saved the
>> .xls file as .csv.
>> Then I opened up the .csv (with Excel) to look at
>> it. In the column of ID
>> codes I saw: Aug-99. Clicking on that entry it
>> showed 1/08/2699.
>>
>> In a column of character data, Excel had interpreted
>> AUG2699 as a date.
>>
>> The .csv did not actually have a date in that cell,
>> but if I had saved the
>> .csv file it would have.
>>
>> David Scott
>>
>>
> _________________________________________________________________
>> David Scott	Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus
>>  		The University of Auckland, PB 92019
>>  		Auckland 1142,    NEW ZEALAND
>> Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830		Fax: +64 9 373 7000
>> Email:	d.scott at auckland.ac.nz
>>
>> Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics
>> Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained,
>> reproducible code.
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>



-- 
Dr. Jose I. de las Heras                      Email: J.delasHeras at ed.ac.uk
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology    Phone: +44 (0)131 6513374
Institute for Cell & Molecular Biology        Fax:   +44 (0)131 6507360
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