hn • r/hackernews
Comment on: Humanity renamed genes because of Excel
We run into a similar issue all the time were certain social media APIs return ids as strings that look live very long numbers. When opened by a non-technical researchers and overwritten by them these ids will have been converted into scientific notation by Excel and the loss of precision rendering the ids useless.We now do a cleaning step prior to handing data to researchers where "id_" is prepended to the data to prevent Excel from casting these strings.