Excel spreadsheet misuse

[John Gray]

For a brief account of various Excel disasters over the years, I recommend this website.

[HansV]

I really love Excel, but I too have seen many horrible uses of spreadsheets. That it's being used to manage critical business accounts is madness.

[StuartR]

I have seen many cases where someone used Excel to prototype an approach, and then that became permanent. Usually even the person who developed the spreadsheet thought this was a terrible idea. This is almost always down to poor governance within the organization.

[John Gray]

Quite often I've seen an Excel spreadsheet being used (usually by an accountant, who 'understands' spreadsheets) rather than a Word table, which would have been more appropriate in the particular circumstance.

[ChrisGreaves]

For a brief account of various Excel disasters over the years, I recommend this website.

The Covid-cases was probably caused by an elected official who knew about Excel, and insisted that Excel be used (so that he/she had a chance of understanding it).

Twenty years ago I was hired for a day to help a high-priced vacation package firm improve their workbook. These folks charge $5,00 per day per person for luxury vacations.
The clerk was untrained.
I watched as she typed in 5000 for the price per day, under that typed in 8 for the number of people, reached across he desk to grab the solar-powered calculator and typed in 5000*8= and then typed 40000 into the third cell. She had no idea that Excel could calculate!

My current "client" uses Excel for data-entry and calculation, which is progress over twenty years, but again, no training in Excel, so the data entry and calculations are on the same sheet (which is akin to using DATA statements to hold your payroll data inside your BASIC payroll program, i think). And so the data entry clerks frequently type a value over a calculated cell. This in a sheet of Sunday Collection Plate data, so presumably the church issues fake tax-receipt statements for its parishioners each year!

I am thinking of a Word/VBA application with a GUI form for data input, a data file with encoded data (so that they can't work out how to edit it), and a second Word/VBA application to spit out reports, as my means of separating data-entry from calculations.

We never had this problem when we all used 80-column punched cards and (later) magnetic tapes. The operators kept the calculations and the data in separate containers!

Cheers, Chris

[Jay Freedman]

Quite a few of the instances reported in that article don't seem to have been caused by the use of Excel, and would have occurred regardless of the tool being used. For example,

The county says recently approved salary increases were “inadvertently omitted in the calculations.” Basically, someone forgot to include those numbers in the spreadsheet.

I've seen plenty of foul-ups in "serious" programming, most of which were caught (or should have been caught) by a mandatory review by colleagues.

[ChrisGreaves]

Quite a few of the instances reported in that article don't seem to have been caused by the use of Excel, and would have occurred regardless of the tool being used.

Absolutely Correct!
Towards the end of my period of paid employment I realized that whenever someone called me in "because we have a computer problem" that it was never a computer problem.
It was always, no exceptions, a people problem.⁽¹⁾

This makes sense when we think of computers as "machines" and look at motor-vehicles.
Cars do not cause collisions.
Across the street from me is a house lot which has a four-wheeler parked within. That car has not caused a collision since midnight.
And that car will not cause a problem at any time in the future.

But once a human being (with car keys) gets into the car, watch out for the possible Ka-Boom!

My new laptop causes no problems.
But once I fire up Excel, or MSWord/VBA, or MSPaint or any other application - Watch Out!

Back in 1969 Quentin von Abbe and I discovered a hardware bug in a CDC 3300 mainframe, but that is the only hardware malfunction I have discovered in 50 years of wrestling with the beasts.

I would argue that the problems caused by a hard disk crash are really the problems that arise because a human did not implement proper backup procedures.

Cheers, Chris
⁽¹⁾ I suspect that 90% of the time the people problem was "lack of proper training"
C.