When Microsoft finally researched how their customers used Excel, they learned that they rarely used it as a spreadsheet; they used it primarily as a database (of sorts). Geneticists have been using Excel to process the massive amounts of data coming out of microarrays — but Excel wasn’t designed for that. From Excel ate my DNA:
Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.
(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)