And if you inadvertently click the save button and overwrite the original file, you and your data are doomed to an eternity of transmogrification. Once the deed is done, it is not undo-able, forcing you to start over. To see the transmogrification in action, cut and paste “Sept1” into a cell within Excel, or create a test file in csv format with some gene symbols in it like “Sept1, DEC2” etc., try to open it using Excel. That default date format conversion has probably caused more grief to molecular biologists than that dreaded black bulb we used for glass pipettes in first year, or that vacuum suction that pulls only the most precious of samples underneath the lab bench when dropped by accident, and only after weeks of preparation. Simply double-clicking the filename in windows or opening a data file from the Excel file menu can cause havoc by automatically transmogrifying your gene symbols (names) into a date format.įor example, the gene symbol “Sept1” will auto-magically be converted to 1-Sep without warning. Well, MS Excel was designed to be an office application and not a scientific data organizer, so it thinks it is smarter than you are and automatically converts any data that appears to be a calendar date entry, into a calendar date entry. So, if you work with lists of gene names, commonly referred to as the “official gene symbol” within MS Excel, be prepared to check your files. Excel polymorphed my gene names into the text equivalent of the mutton vindaloo beast. If you are still with me after the last two articles on using Excel to work your lab results, and you routinely use this business-oriented spreadsheet application for organizing your scientific data, you may be in for a shock. As in, “Kryten and I were transmogrified into another time dimension”.Īnyway, enough of 80’s cult TV shows.

It sounds like something Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the writers of the sci-fi comedy series, Red Dwarf, would make up.

Excel symbols name