add examples with gene names converted to dates about spreadsheet-ecology-lesson HOT 8 CLOSED

A nice overview of some common pitfals of using Excel in bioinformatics can be found in Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics. Zeeberg et al., BMC Bioinformatics 2004, 5:80 . Contains amusing example of RIKEN identifier "2310009E13" converted to floating-point number, and various gene name -> data conversion horrors

note added later: I now see that Mateusz' link mentions the same paper. Oh well

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Thanks, these are good pointers.

This issue might be good to move over to the organization-genomics lesson https://github.com/datacarpentry/organization-genomics

@mkuzak and @plijnzaad ok if we move it over there?

from spreadsheet-ecology-lesson.

Agreed that it would be good to move this to the genomics lessons as it seems more relevant there. @mkuzak and @plijnzaad would this be ok?

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I think it's relevant to both. It's an example from genomics but deals with what not to do in the spreadsheet.

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Thanks @mkuzak. I think this is likely a change that won't happen before the release of this lesson at the end of the month. Just by way of record-keeping, I'm adding an "after-lesson-release" tag here. If you (or someone else) would like to incorporate this before lesson release, please let me know and I'll remove the tag!

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@ErinBecker , I think @mkuzak is correct and this is relevant to both. OMG I had fits working with all the Septins (SEP1-13) and Membrane Associated Receptors (MAR) of the dog genome. The topic fits in well with the use of dates and proper formatting. It's also important because some of the changes Excel makes cannot be changed back to the original text!! I'm not saying I'll have time to write up a good exercise, but the sooner the better.

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More descriptive examples are required for data cleaning and formulae. I have found that the "Concatenate" formula really comes in handy in my field of work.

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It looks like this was addressed in #231, so I'm going to close this issue. @mkuzak if you think more details are needed, please feel free to reopen. Thanks!

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