Is there ever a valid reason for storing bioinformatics data in a Microsoft Word document? by Keith Bradnam.
You already know the answer from the title so I will skip to the conclusion:
This is not an acceptable practice! Use of Microsoft Word to store bioinformatics data will only ever result in unhappiness, frustration, and anger.
I think Keith, myself and many others who make the same or similar points are missing one critical issue:
Why is MS Word (or Excel) so much easier to use than other applications for bioinformatics?
Or perhaps even more to the point:
Why hasn’t bioinformatics lobbied for extensions to MS Word or Excel to work with their workflow?
For the most part, users aren’t really interested in a personal relationship with their computer or a religious experience with their software. They want to get some non-hardware/non-software task done. (full stop)
Rather than trying to fix users, why don’t we try to fix their tools?
Shouldn’t I be able to create a new MS Word or OpenOffice document, indicate that it contains gene names and simply type them in? And have them intelligently extracted for use with genome databases?
“Fixing” users isn’t a winning strategy. Let’s trying fixing their tools. No promises but we know the other approach fails.