Just learned that you can now turn off Microsoft Excel’s previously incessant desire to corrupt your data files by automatically converting your carefully handcrafted data into an entirely inappropriate different type.

Go into Options, then Data, to do this:

The things you can turn off include:

• Remove leading zeros and convert to a number
• Keep first 15 digits of long numbers and display in scientific notation.
• Convert digits surrounding the letter E to a number in scientific notation.
• Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date

If only genetics scientists had waited yet another 3 years before deciding that it was just easier to rename a stack of human genes than wait for Microsoft to do something about the issue given the prevalence of Excel-driven errors in their literature