Excel is one of many programs used in fields ranging from banking and finance to engineering and medicine. In the latter case, geneticists routinely struggled with the program's habit of converting text to dates, causing gene naming errors in research papers.

Well, after years of realization, Microsoft finally updated Excel and solved this problem once and for all.

As reported by the Verge, the original problem was not as mundane as one might expect. If your job involves entering thousands of genetic codes into a spreadsheet, you would want to get it all right. Before this update was applied, however, Excel automatically converted text input into dates.

Previously, the solution was to reformat the cells to prevent this, but if the spreadsheet was saved as a type that did not retain formatting, the next person to use that data would open it and get a bunch of dates.

Given the amount of genetics research being done around the world, such a simple mistake could lead to widespread and potentially harmful problems. The scientific community in question eventually resorted to renaming many human genes to prevent things from getting worse.

In a blog posted last week, Microsoft revealed that it had finally responded to feedback from Excel users and released an update to the Windows and MacOS versions that allows users to disable the automatic renaming system.

If you are using the latest version of Excel, simply go to "File" in the lower left corner and click on "Options." Select Data from the menu and you will see the new Automatic Data Conversion option. Just uncheck the last checkbox!

It is important to note that Google Sheets will convert text input to date as well. The only way to avoid this is to format the column or row as text before entering the data.

Now, before you think all of this is just making a mountain out of a molehill, the problem with Excel's automatic data conversion can be traced back to 2016. That means it took Microsoft seven years to recognize and finally address the issue. And since the solution was simple, it is not clear why it took so long.

By comparison, waiting a month or two for an important game patch to be released seems like a blur.