Around the world we rely on #spreadsheets to manage projects & assemble/analyse data... so the news that research suggests 90% of spreadsheets over 150 lines contain one major error.
Not only that, while easy to make, such errors are hard(er) to find.
As so often, what seems like a technical issue of little major consequence, as Simon Thorne (Cardiff MU) explores here actually they can be the root of all sorts of significant problems.
We need to be clearer about them!
@ChrisMayLA6 Computer Programmer here. I've seen millions written off when spreadsheets are used as proxies for proper accounting practices. I've seen valuable analysts waste half their hours every month cutting-and-pasting data b'twn sheets. I've seen development teams struggle to place complex, fragile, error-prone formulas into Excel in VBA all because the project leads wouldn't tell the users to sit down when they demanded a spreadsheet. Training? Standardisation? Don't make me laugh.
The claims dept of a well known insurance company had a guy working in the department who was a bit of an amateur wizard with Excel and had produced more than 100 spreadsheets for various purposes, for his dept. Unfortunately, the functioning of the claims dept had come to be totally dependent on these damned spreadsheets which were undocumented and developed to no proper standards. Finally, the day came when the developer reached retiring age and the IT dept were asked to take over all these spreadsheets for maintenance and update. The IT dept said "sure - that will be £25,000 per spreadsheet" which came to substantially more than the whole IT budget (software and hardware) for that dept!
@Paulos_the_fog @boggin @ChrisMayLA6
Not mine, but raw truth.
@Ruskin_Marc @boggin @ChrisMayLA6
A mobile phone provider I was contracted to, had an Excel spreadsheet containing the details of all their transceivers along with the frequencies assigned to each one and a load of other pertinent data. As the network expanded, more and more transceivers needed to be added to this monster spreadsheet such that it took anything up to 10 minutes to open the damned thing! I was recruited to move all this data to a database where it should have been stored in the first place but met implacable resistance from all the guys working on frequency allocation even though it would have made their lives much easier if I have succeeded. In the end the rollout of frequency hopping saved the day as no specific frequency is allocated to network nodes using that technology!
