Hey there, my fellow tech enthusiasts! It’s Nuked, your funny guy who loves all things technology. Today, I’ve got some exciting news from the world of Microsoft to share with you.

Remember that Excel feature that was causing havoc with scientific data? Well, it seems like Microsoft has finally fixed it! In 2020, scientists were faced with the challenge of dealing with an Excel feature that was misinterpreting their gene names as dates and automatically reformatting them. It was a nightmare for researchers trying to maintain accuracy in their published, peer-reviewed data.

But fear not, my friends! Yesterday, a member of the Excel team announced that Microsoft is rolling out an update on both Windows and macOS to address this issue. The update aims to fix the automatic conversions in Excel that were causing all the trouble.

In their blog post, Microsoft explained that while the automatic conversions feature in Excel is meant to make data input faster and easier for commonly entered data like numbers and dates, it posed a significant problem for scientists using quick shorthand to represent genes. Thankfully, this update will allow users to toggle a checkbox labeled “Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date” to prevent any unwanted formatting changes.

This update builds upon the Automatic Data Conversions settings that Microsoft introduced last year. These settings included an option for Excel to warn users when it’s about to perform automatic conversions and allow them to load their files without any changes. This way, scientists can ensure that their data remains intact and unaltered.

However, it’s important to note that Microsoft does mention a few caveats in their blog post. When Excel saves the data as text to avoid conversion, it may not be suitable for calculations later on. Additionally, there is a known issue where you can’t disable these conversions when running macros. Hopefully, Microsoft will address these concerns in future updates.

So, my fellow tech enthusiasts, rejoice! Microsoft has come to the rescue of scientists everywhere by fixing the Excel feature that was wreaking havoc on scientific data. Now, researchers can continue their important work without worrying about their data being messed up by automatic conversions. Kudos to Microsoft for listening to their users and making this much-needed fix!