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Microsoft Excel's auto-correction has long annoyed casual users. Dashes (破折号) before lists of numbers are misread as a minus sign. Phone numbers lose their leading zeroes. Credit-card numbers get re-expressed in scientific notation, like 1.30521E+17.

Geneticists struggle with a particular version of this problem. A gene (基因) called Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type finger 1, commonly known as MARCH1, is, for instance, frequently re-encoded as the date March 1. Something similar happens to genes in the Septin family, of which SEPT1 is a member, and to Basic Helix-Loop-Helix Family Member E41, often known as DEC2.

This problem was first noticed in 2004, but was brought to wider attention in 2016 by Mark Ziemann of Deakin University, in Australia. By surveying 166,000 genomics-related papers published between 2014 and 2020, he and his co-authors showed that the number of papers using Excel has steadily increased, and the proportion with auto-correct errors is at around 30%.

Errors have also been flagged by researchers in other languages. In Portuguese, for instance, AGO2 (Argonaute RISC Catalytic Component 2) rebrands itself as Agosto 2. Dutch users experience problems with MEI1 (Meiotic Double-Stranded Break Formation Protein 1), "Mei" being the Dutch for "May". And geneticists in Finland, where the first month of the year is called Tammikuu, find TAMM41 encoding itself as 41st of January.

This continuing state of affairs is surprising. In August 2020, the committee which standardises gene names renamed those beginning MARC, MARCH and SEPT to begin MTARC, MARCHF and SEPTIN, and rebranded DEC1 as DELEC1. Other problematic gene names remained, but this was widely seen as a step in the right direction. Dr Ziemann's latest paper, though, suggests that few researchers have taken it.

Such errors often seem amusing rather than dangerous. But they reflect a deeper problem, which is that spreadsheets allow such silent errors, too well camouflaged for authors or their editors to spot, to go undetected for years. To stop this, Dr Ziemann recommends researchers abandon software like Excel in favor of scheduled code written with scientific applications in mind. Such programs are more difficult to be autocorrected and easier to examine. Whether his advice will be taken this time remains to be seen.