May 3, 2015
Guidelines for Sharing Data in Spreadsheets
If you share scientific data in spreadsheets, these best practices are a must-read.
When publishing data, we should optimize for readability by machines rather than humans. This is because anyone using our data will probably be running it through their own scripts or statistics package rater than just looking at it in Excel. It is also much easier to quickly re-format raw data in Excel for human readably than it is to split up merged cells or strip out cruft from around numbers (e.g. statistical significance ***s in the same column as numbers).
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