While it looks like the operator just fills in numbers and words into the table, the Excel software always seems to have a mind of its own .
Automatically convert ID numbers into scientific notation, turn a lot of numbers into dates… not to mention the difficult action of copying and pasting tables. Every wrong result in Excel seems to be filled with “rebellious”.
You never know what will happen to the cell you just filled in when you press enter. 
Excel, thank you for being arrogantly smart
Do a random search on the Internet, and you can find all kinds of Excel Q&A and learning packages. Maybe you once thought, “Isn’t it just filling out a form”, but after seeing the following incidents of Excel harm, you may really want to sign up for a class. 
Philosophy of using Excel
Automatic conversion, it is better not to convert
Excel always wants to help you, the kind of disservice.
According to Microsoft’s official website, to make it easier for you, Excel has been pre-programmed. This gives Excel some “mind “ to automatically correct or predict text for us. For example, the number or letter string is automatically changed to a date, or the 0 in front of the number is directly deleted. Adhering to the automatic conversion attitude of “the mountain does not turn the water, and the water does not turn I turn”, Excel has helped users a lot. 
No one can stop Excel’s cleverness丨Microsoft
But sometimes, these automatic transitions just make the user feel “the world is spinning”.
Many geneticists have lost Excel. A 2016 paper mentioned that 1 in 5 papers in top genomics journals had the wrong gene name in their supplemental data . On a larger scale, people collected 11,000 papers from 2014 to 2020 and found that almost a third of the papers had the wrong gene name .
These mistakes are all to blame for Excel’s “warmheartedness”. 
Gene Name Change Date｜The Verge
In the table, when you enter the MARCH1 gene and press enter, the gene name becomes the wrong 1-Mar (March 1). Excel “kindly” automatically recognizes MARCH1 as a date and converts it to the standard date format . The genes SEPT1 and DEC1 were also not spared, and thus became September 1st and December 1st.
Scientists discovered the problem as early as 2004 and called for Excel to provide an option to turn off autofill and correction. But this did not bring about change, and Excel pitted more and more scientists. By 2017, the HGNC, a committee dedicated to naming genes, had to rename 27 “Excel victim genes,” including SEPT4 (now SEPTIN4) and MARCH1 (now MARCHF1).
The fake news website The Allium also satirized that year: The scientific community has decided to surrender to Microsoft! Officially change all gene names to dates! 
Since 2021, researcher Mark Ziemann has decided to publish a monthly ranking of illegal journals to count gene name errors in well-known journals丨ziemann-lab.net/public/gene_name_errors
It is enough for Excel to sow this one error, because it will send the fruit of the error to the world. The British MI5 was also pitted by Excel to the point of “social death”. In 2010, MI5 wiretapped hundreds of the wrong people because of incorrect table data. Excel automatically changed the last three digits of some users’ mobile phone numbers to 000 , which led to the wiretapping of 134 ordinary people who had nothing to do with the investigation, but the suspect narrowly escaped. MI5 later had to manually check the numbers each time it processed the data. 
Excel’s auto-fill intelligence is probably ⬆️丨@meme.xlsx/Twitte
Fortunately, in the preview version of Microsoft Office (version 2207) released this year, users can finally manually turn off the automatic data conversion function they do not need, and the world-class problem has finally been solved!
don’t use functions,
You can only pay to death
Of all the Excel victims, JPMorgan Chase & Co. should have suffered the most. In 2021, they lost $6 billion due to tabular data errors. They investigated the root cause behind it: the function in Excel was used incorrectly .
According to the JPMorgan Chase report, these advanced models and data were manually copied into Excel . If the function is not checked for validity after copying the error, it may cause very serious errors in subsequent use. 
Kodak also suffered painful losses. In 2005, an employee hit several zeros when calculating severance pay in Excel, resulting in Kodak’s loss of severance pay for the year reaching $11 million. And that was worse for Kodak, which was losing $100 million a quarter at the time.
Whether it’s Excel’s own stupidity or the user’s trembling hands, the widespread use of spreadsheets in data work has also paved the way for a large number of mistakes. In the vast cell, it is really not that easy to find the data in question. 
To document these serious errors, an organization specializing in spreadsheet errors emerged: the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (EuSpRIG). On the EuSpRIG website, we can see that many companies have lost millions of dollars because they are not proficient in using Excel. Research documented on the website shows that more than 90% of spreadsheets contain errors due to personal clerical errors, and that almost half of the spreadsheet models in large corporations have “major flaws” .
James Kwak, a law professor, commented: No matter how smart the bank’s experts are and how sophisticated the technology is, when the numbers in the Excel table are wrong, the table will not tell you that the calculation is wrong. After all, software is software, not to mention Excel, which has almost no barriers to use?
Excel User Guide,
If you don’t study, you’re not a civil servant
However, Excel has no threshold, which is probably the biggest misconception people have about it.
Without data scrutiny, testing and training, even British government officials have lost face because they “can’t” use Excel. In 2020, the UK’s hugely expensive (£12bn) COVID-19 case tracking system missed information on 16,000 positive COVID-19 cases because of a table error. In 2012, a financial modelling error in the UK Department of Transport’s Excel led to the withdrawal of a £9bn contract and a loss of £300m. In 2010, an Excel calculation error in a paper led to drastic cuts to public services and benefits in the UK.
After this series of events, the UK may really have to train their civil servants to learn how to use Excel.
There are people who don’t know how to use tables, and there are people who can play with Excel. In the hands of some great gods, drawing a pixel painting in an Excel table can only be regarded as a basic operation. Using Excel data to draw a Cowherd and Weaver Girl for others can be said to be the most dazzling and romantic. Others have designed “2048” and “The Legend of Zelda” that can be played in tables based on functions and plug-ins in Excel. 
There are also developers who ported Zelda to Excel, named Excelda (also Zelda)丨GamesExcel/Youtube
Even more powerful is the “Excel Tournament”. Financiers can solve difficult Excel problems at the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC). However, in this year’s competition, some finalists also lost their championship due to misplaced formulas or wrongly copied formats . It seems that even spreadsheet experts are not immune to being tricked by Excel.
There is still a long way to go to learn Excel. But thanks also to Excel for allowing publishers to publish more books: 30 days to quickly give up Excel.
references
[1] ‘Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates’, https://ift.tt/5vzPnl3′
[2] ‘Excel autocorrect errors still plague genetic research, raising concerns over scientific rigour’, https://ift.tt/VWSE1Lz’
[3] ‘Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache’,
[4] Ziemann, M., Eren, Y., & El-Osta, A. (2016). Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature. Genome biology, 17(1), 1-3.
[5] Zeeberg, Barry R., et al. “Mitaken identifiers: gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics.” BMC bioinformatics 5.1 (2004): 1-6.
[6] ‘Escape gene name-mangling with ‘Escape Excel’, https://ift.tt/QBzG7iL
[7] ‘MI5 makes 1,061 bugging errors’, https://ift.tt/gLljsHy
[8] ‘Report Details Missteps in Trading at JPMorgan’, https://ift.tt/waskJfy
[9] ‘The Importance of Excel’, https://ift.tt/ZsfFRtJ
[10] https://ift.tt/jYvIemz
[11] ‘Kodak restates, adds $9 million to loss’, https://ift.tt/xOEcyjR
[12] ‘Excel errors: the UK government has an embarrassingly long history of spreadsheet horror stories’ https://ift.tt/lAq2kKR
[13] ‘Excel esports on ESPN show world the pain of format errors’, https://ift.tt/Fnayl6B
Author: Chen Mo Editor: Owl, Window Knocking Rain
an AI
You hurt me, but excel 
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