There will still be a library of discarded names and symbols to help reduce confusion going forward.
The scientific community has changed gene names before, but usually to minimize false positives in search results or to be sensitive to the concerns of patients. Now, it’s directly in response to software design — technology is getting in the way of research rather than speeding it up.
We’ve asked Microsoft for comment on the issue. However, we wouldn’t count on an Excel patch solving the issue. Buford noted to The Verge that genetic data represents “quite a limited use case” for Excel, and that an option to disable the date formatting would only help a tiny number of users. Still, this is a reminder that automatic formatting can easily go haywire, and that you shouldn’t take it for granted.