Hello;
I recently analyzed the video data of climbing assay in drosophila using Fiji. I used a valid plug-in for tracking flies. At the end of the analysis, Fiji converts the results to excel documents (.xls). I suppose to have sequentially decreasing data in the excel files, but I get a series of crazy numbers instead. Besides, some of the data (numbers) are changed to dates. Please find the attached file to have a look at.
When I try to analyse the videos on another computer (Imac), there is no problem with the excel files. I can get the proper results without mistakes. Something seems wrong with my computer (Mac) or program. Everything is updated. Has anybody had a similar problem before, or do you have any idea what's wrong with Fiji on my computer?
I appreciate your help.
Best,
Dilara
Hi Dilara Nemutlu Samur ,
There is nothing wrong with your FIJI, the culprit is MS Excel. This is a well known issues where Excel auto-formats anything that even remotely looks like a date into a date format. In the case of certain gene names it was literally easier for the gene nomenclature committee to change the symbols of several human genes than to consistently stop Excel from messing up your data: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4
There isn't a very good workaround I'm afraid. You may have to change the formatting of the column manually to 'Text', as outlined here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/stop-automatically-changing-numbers-to-dates-452bd2db-cc96-47d1-81e4-72cec11c4ed8
In this case you will have to be really careful, as in some cases the conversion back from a date format results in a completely different output than what is supposed to be in the cell.
Alternatively, you could do your analysis in R or some other programming language, but if you aren't already doing that it will probably be more trouble than it's worth.
I believe LibreOffice, unlike Excel, has options to disable date formatting features, but I have not used it personally.
Hi Máté Nászai ;
Thank you for sharing your ideas. It is very annoying that Excel has uncorrected issues. I've tried hard to change something in Excel to get clear results. I suppose I have found the reason for my corrupted data.
My issue was much simpler than I thought. It was all about language settings! Seems funny; however, region-dependent date/time/number formatting changes my data because I use Excel in Turkish language and with its settings. What I did was change the decimal and thousand separators to the EN version. It worked!
I appreciate your help and your other suggestions. I am happy not to do analysis in R or other since I haven't used them before :)
Thank you for your time.
Best,
Dilara
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