Excel is NOT a database. I don't understand the people who use it as such (and I've come across many who do).
Then they're surprised when it all goes tits-up.
Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
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Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#92[deleted]
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the anglosphere when you're in the managerial class, you fail upwards it seems.
We have a meritocracy apparently, so if you have got to the top you must be good and therefore your talents shouldn't be wasted.
Marketing director of one of the largest travel firms in the UK at 27! Such talent at such a young age (teeth grinding intensifies)
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#94Professionalism has been entirely absent from the top-level handling of the pandemic. It's not entirely clear from the article who's responsible for this, but I note that the so-called "NHS" test and trace is in fact an outsourced organisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Test_and_Trace run by Tory placewoman Dido Harding. > "She is a former chief executive of the TalkTalk Group where she faced calls for her to…
While that is true, I have a little difficulty imagining that Harding or anyone else senior was involved in the process of shoveling around spreadsheets. As the overall leadership she obviously has the accountability but just saying, "oh what do you expect when you put a crony in?" ignores the reality that a number of people on an operational level had been doing this for months and nobody seems to have stopped it.
The latest news is that apparently this was a problem with Public Health England's internal processes anyway, not NHS Test and Trace or any other kind of outsourced service: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54422505 I don't think that even falls under Harding's responsibilties.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1313046638915706880 > The reason was apparently that the database is managed in Excel and the number of columns had reached the maximum.
Columns!? You're meant to add additional records as rows! (Excel supports only 16,384 columns, but 1,048,576 rows.) Actually, this was a pet peeve of mine: Especially in the early days of COVID, just about every official or unofficial data source was an absolute shitshow: - Transposed data (new entries in columns) - Pretty printed dates (instead of ISO 8601 or Excel format, or... anything even vaguely parseable by co…
They seem to have hit the row limit, not the column limit. They were using Excel to collate the data coming in from different test centres: when one of the CSVs was loaded in, the row limit was exceeded and Excel cut off the extra rows without the operator realising (I'm going off reporting by Alex Hearn at The Guardian here, and he's normally pretty good)
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#96Actual title:
Covid: Test error 'should never have happened' - Hancock
Please note this has been discussed quite a lot here today.
Eg.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#97Wish we knew more details. Maybe helpful for people that don’t know... Xls excel has a 64k row limit. Newer xlsx has 1mm row limit. Or maybe they were putting people in by columns and hit the 16.3k column limit?
Or maybe it wasn't excel at all. One number the UK government doesn't release is how many people are tested. They have spent the summer championing "testing capacity", which we found out at the start of September was a lie. They release the number of tests done, and the number of people returning positive. They don't release the number of people done -- if you're tested twice, that counts as two on the number of test…
(This comment was posted before we merged the threads from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685911. The current article confirms that it was Excel.)
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#98[deleted]
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#99Spreadsheets like Excel or Google Docs, with the expandability offered by VB and JavaScript, allow for rapid development of applications that require data storage and data interpretation in one package. I’ve seen them used and abused for several functions over the course of my career.
Apple/Claris FileMaker has had this niche for a bit, but it’s only been a niche,
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#100Actual title: Covid: Test error 'should never have happened' - Hancock Please note this has been discussed quite a lot here today. Eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685950
You're right. But this article contains significant new information (SNI) about Excel, and spreadsheet topics are perennially interesting to HN readers, so this is the rare case where a quick follow-up article, and also the title change, probably makes sense. Usually it goes the other way of course:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...