Microsoft Resolves Excel's Scientific Data Wrecking Glitch
Originally Published 2 years ago — by Gizmodo
Microsoft has released an update for Excel that allows users to disable Automatic Data Conversion, addressing an issue that forced scientists to rename human gene names due to Excel converting them to dates. Previously, there was no option to disable this automatic conversion, resulting in errors and data loss in scientific papers. The update includes a checkbox to toggle the conversion feature on or off, as well as a warning message for automatic number conversions when opening certain file types. However, the new conversion option does not work when running macros.