If you found that Excel is the best medium for sharing your data, then you surely have not done your research. Sorry, but Excel is a non-solution. Excel is where the problems start.

is your question really related to bioinformatics ? stackoverlow would be a better choice. Ah, and don't use excel. Please.

As bioinformaticians, I feel we can explain the reasons not to use Excel more effectively than flaming those that use it! Regardless of it being off topic I think perhaps a link to a paper (e.g. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80 or What Are The Most Common Stupid Mistakes In Bioinformatics? ) would be more helpful. This flaming of less experienced "newbie" users occurs in many disciplines and I don't think it's the most productive way of responding to a genuine question.

@julieN, a search on Google brings up http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=617606. Effective web searching is a useful tool! See here http://www2.hull.ac.uk/acs/lib/infoskills/effweb.aspx

I did consider a long answer as to why Excel is a poor solution, but that would not have answered the question. Easier to declare the question off-topic than write what they don't want to hear :-)

"Don't use excel" is like saying don't eat vanilla ice cream because there are so many better flavors out there. 98% of biologists use excel, and it's a useful and ubiquitous tool (it's just another tool that need not be discarded). I think this question is related to bioinformatics because I can think of interesting ways to use excel + images to do bioinformatics with people, and I didn't know it was possible to insert images into comments before I saw it. It was a well asked question. Why flame unnecessarily?

That's fair enough :-) I think sometimes it's easy for us to go into BOFH mode though and tell people to RTFM! Lol!

That's fair enough @neilfws :-) I think it's easy for us to go into BOFH mode though, and tell people to RTFM, LOL!

For the record, my users and I are all aware of the gene name problem as well as other problems with Excel. As I mentioned in my question, we have other, well-designed (one custom, one open-source, one commercial) viewers available without these problems, yet Excel is still their system of choice. Portability and familiarity are more compelling than the negatives in our case. Until I find or design software that my users are willing to use as readily as Excel, I need to make sure that they have what they need to do their research.

Given Excel's popularity, distributable spreadsheets can be created with a single application that contain embedded images. While it does not insert images into comments as discussed here, this comprehensive Excel add-in is well worth checking out.