It is shortsighted to call this behavior a "useful feature". It was and is a grave and serious mistake.
Automatically converting SEPT1 to a date caused far more damage than the benefit of the fleeting convenience.
The damage that this "feature" caused and will keep causing goes far beyond the domain of bioinformatics.
Even in bioinformatics things have not been "solved", for the next decade the same gene will have two names when looking it up in previously published data.
> Automatically converting SEPT1 to a date caused far more damage than the benefit of the fleeting convenience.
Who are you to judge? For the novice, even for most users it'll be what they want. And for the expert (or even intermediate user) it is trivial to override.
How exactly would you trivially correct the massive number of published results in genomics data where SEPT1 was converted to a date?
20% of publications had errors introduced by Excel in them! The real number is probably much higher (Nature had a rate of 35%). What is the rationale in saying that the benefits must still be worth it?
See: Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature
The root of the problem is not about how Excel displays information, or how Excel parses the data but that the data it tacitly changed upon saving it.
Open a CSV file that has SEPT1, don't take any action, save it right away. Boom, the data has been changed and you cannot recover the original information.
Automatically converting SEPT1 to a date caused far more damage than the benefit of the fleeting convenience.
The damage that this "feature" caused and will keep causing goes far beyond the domain of bioinformatics.
Even in bioinformatics things have not been "solved", for the next decade the same gene will have two names when looking it up in previously published data.