Episode 190 – Sometimes The Waveforms Lie

In Episode 190, Ben and Scott talk about the difficulties of naming human genes when Excel gets in the way, improvements coming to the automatic cleanup of deployment history within Azure Resource Manager, and the automatic enablement of App Lock in the Microsoft Authenticator app. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 190 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on August 7th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott talk about Excel getting in the way of naming human genes, Azure resource manager deployment cleanup, and the Microsoft Authenticator app among other recent Microsoft Cloud news. Had to make sure it wasn't picking up my audio somewhere else because the waveforms can lie. - The wave, okay. - Well, you just kinda see the waveforms there. You don't know which mic it's coming from. - The waveforms can lie. That's gonna become my new motto mantra. - The waveforms can lie, not human genes are really dates. - This is like, super fun because we all know that Excel makes the world go round. And, - Absolutely. - Excel not only makes the world go round. I mean, it's a database, it's a defacto kind of business driver. It does so many things that people don't think about in so many industries and so many businesses to the point that it impacts the way scientists on a global scale name human genes, so that they can continue their research, which is just amazing. - I had not seen this article until you sent it to me this morning. - It's an issue with the way that Excel automatically parses data. So, I'm sure we've all been there where you paste a number into Excel, or you Paste a string that has a number on it and Excel decides it is, something else. So, some genes have alphanumeric symbols, like there'll be a mix of uppercase alphas and a number such as MARCH1, which is short for membrane associated ring-CH-type finger 1. But, Excel doesn't know that MARCH1 is membrane associated ring-CH-type finger 1. It thinks that that is the 1st of March. So, it will change it into a date column with formatting that is appropriate for what you put in, which was MARCH1. So, it'll be 1-Mar, one March, right? And you go to the next column and the next column could be one April and then one May, but that's not what you were trying to do. You were trying to do another thing. So, you would think as a rational person, you would come back and say, "Okay, auto formatting is getting in the way of me putting my gene data into Excel so that I can do whatever manipulations or visualizations of the data that I want to there." Well, Excel does not offer the option to turn off auto formatting. And the only way that you could really avoid it is to remember that you'd have to change the data type for each individual column before you went and pasted that data in there. So, that would certainly be a way around it, but you'd have to teach every scientist in the world how to do this, that uses Excel. And that might not be the most scalable thing. So, how do you fix this problem? Excel, well can't be fixed, but you can fix the way or change the way that you name things to better accommodate the tools that your users use. So therefore, the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee or the HGNC has recently published new guidelines for gene naming, including that any symbols that affect data handling and retrieval like MARCH1, would fall into that category. They will now be renamed, so MARCH1 is gonna become MARCHF1, SEPT1, S-E-P-T-1, has become SEPTIN1 and a number of others along the way. So, as of right now, 27 genes have been renamed to accommodate this. And of course there will potentially be more. - Huh? - Yeah.