[epistasis]

It's not usually computational biologists who are using Excel.

What if you want to share data with a wetlab biologist who want to explore their favorite list of genes on their own?

[meow1032]

There are lots of great computational biologists, but being a computational biologist doesn't necessitate being good with computers. Plenty of PI's rely pretty much exclusively on grad students and post-docs to run all their analyses.

Not that I'm saying using excel is bad either. I use excel plenty to look at data. But scientists need to know how to use the tools that they have.

[baddox]

If people are just looking at the spreadsheets then wouldn’t the cells interpreted as dates not be a problem? It seems like it would only be a problem if you’re doing computation on the cells.

[benhurmarcel]

Excel changes the displayed text when it interprets the text as date. You store "MARCH1", it displays "1-Mar".