This isn’t a fix. Excel wasn’t meant for this. While I do understand it’s convenient as a database, unless you’re doing something unimportant and small you just really should use something proper. And even now that this “problem” is gone, I am certain there are still more things that cause trouble. You can not satisfy everyone and Excel was just… not made for gene info storage.

Even if you don’t want to use stuff that isn’t Microsoft Office, that comes with Microsoft Access, which is a proper database management system. It’s literally in the same software package, so why do people refuse to use it?

"Microsoft’s blog adds caveats, such as that Excel avoids the conversion by saving the data as text, which means the data may not work for calculations later. There’s also a known issue where you can’t disable the conversions when running macros. "

This sounds very half assed…

The idea that any scientist is doing data analysis in Excel is honestly terrifying on every level.