But they don't, and that's a problem. It's an education problem: everybody automatically defaults to Excel, even when it's not the proper tool. People need to learn about better tools.
You can't force people to use a different tool that they don't want to use. They [(computational) biologists] know other tools pretty well, they don't want to use them. If you want to help, work on better tools for them, based on their needs. Regulation is about the worst thing you could've thought of. If you said this to my gf's research group, they would yell at you, Excel is a loved piece of software among them, and other spreadsheet applications are not even close. They don't want to have a dozen different tools that they have to switch between fifty times an hour, converting data in the meantime, they want to know one or two very well and have the data all there. Excel is a data swiss army knife, which is exactly what they need, it has some warts but forcing them off Excel really is not the solution.
Where am I talking about forcing them? You're the only one bringing that up, and I strongly disagree with it. Education is not force, it's empowering.
The only reason they want to use a tool that doesn't really fit their use case, is because they're not aware of better tools. I find it very hard to believe that scientists actually want to use a tool that corrupts their data. If that is true, then that is absolutely a problem with their attitude towards science and data.
It's not that hard to imagine a tool that can do exactly what Excel can, but without corrupting your data. It might even exist already. LibreOffice got mentioned a lot; it can do almost(?) everything Excel can, but without corrupting your data. If there are problems with it that make it useless to scientists, there's a good chance the LibreOffice community can fix them.
I think better tools that preserve the integrity of their data are absolutely the solution here.
You're taking a minor, very unusual issue that happens only to a subset of a subset of a subset of users and resolving it with regulation, while forgeting all the cases where Excel works perfectly for them. Libreoffice is good, but it has much more warts than Excel does and the presentantion capabilities (a key functionality) simply are not as good.
Are you seriously opposed to education because you see it as regulation?
Also, I don't think it's a very minor issue if the tool you use to process your data, changes your data. It may only do that in limited cases, but the fact that it does it at all should alarm anyone who cares about data integrity.
> This is the exact sort of thing that indicates market-power being concentrated to a point requiring severe, acute regulatory action.
This is what I react to. Sorry I missed that you're not the original commenter, that's my bad.
I am not sure though what other tool should the biologists learn - they usually know R and Python and they use Excel because they need what Excel offers; there isn't any other software that allows them to easily do whatever they need to do with the data, quickly iterating on the ideas AND then present it nicely.
The solution here should be to fix Excel, but it really is a small issue (that has been worked around, too; and if you know how to use excel correctly, it does not happen to you) compared to making another Excel, which seems like a monstrous task.
Yeah, that wasn't me, and that comment was already countered by pointing out there was plenty of competition in the spreadsheet market. My reaction was that a lot of people may not be aware of all the options and simply default to Excel because that's what they know.
You're claiming that they do know the alternatives but the alternatives fail in worse ways than Excel does.
I don't know what the magic sauce is that makes Excel so much better than the alternatives, or why it would be such a monstrous task to replicate that. My impression is just that to many people, Excel is simply the default tool to enter data in, no matter what the actual problems with Excel are. Excel is like gravity; good or bad, you put up with it because it is what it is. And if that's the case, that'd be pretty bad and in need of change, because Excel is not at all like gravity; it's merely one tool of many. If there's a more appropriate tool, people should use that. If there isn't, one could be developed.
I stand by my point that a standard data collection tool that modifies the data you put into it is a really bad idea for any field where accuracy and data integrity is important, and I'd expect science to be one of those fields. You may be able to work around the limitations of the tool, but the risk is still there.
