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Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

bbc.com

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Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#151

Post by rchaud »

ImaCake wrote: post #68
CamperBob2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. We need to drop calculus, even geometry if we have to, in order to make room in the curriculum for statistics. Statistical illiteracy kills.

I mean, statistics relies heavily on calculus. It might be best to try and fit both in. Something at least a little bit fun and educational could be achieved with some dice throwing or simple computer simulations. High school students place dice games, they will immediately appreciate how useful a bit of probability would be in that context.

Trignometric calculus comprised at least half my high school calc assignments ~20 years ago. Surely that can be scaled back in favour of more lessons on statistics and probability.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#152

Post by anonymousDan »

jasiek wrote: post #45
pjc50 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason Serco is used is their political connections; they really ought to have been banned from consideration after the fraud scandal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50806919 (my one-step programme for improving UK public contracting would be that after a significant failed contract the contracting company and its directors and any other companies they are directors of would be banned from tendering for a per…

Unfortunately the procurement rules currently in place prevent procurement personnel evaluating a tender from taking into account any prior performance . I'm unsure whether this is a result of EU legislation and common market rules, or whether it is just the UK.

Please tell me that is not true. That is just...nuts! What is the rationale behind that beyond corruption?

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#153

Post by mark-r »

morsch wrote: post #29
daanlo wrote: post #16

We did a bit of work for laboratories this year and csv is not an uncommon exchange format between labs. In general almost all exchange formats are text based, with labs saying they will upgrade to „modern xml formats“ at some point in the future. So seen in this context a csv or an excel file doesn‘t really surprise me and should probably also be seen in this context.

CSV seems like a good choice for this kind of tabular, linear data.

Have you seen the kind of mess Excel can make with a CSV file? The names of several genes were recently changed so that Excel would stop mangling them.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#154

Post by zarq »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #122
callamdelaney wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a user issue, it's a government incompetence issue. Who was the technical genius who thought 'right, we need to store thousands of lines of critical and important data, I know! Excel!'

Alternatively... "We need to store some data for a virus" "Where does the data come from?" "Every hospital sends us an excel sheet" "Well, let's merge all of it into a bigger sheet and display it or export it"

"We should maybe start tracking some of this" "Where does the data come from?" "Dunno, a handful of hospitals... maybe?" "Right. Let's just use Excel, not gonna waste time on that now"

... six months later ...

"Hey um..."

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#155

Post by bencollier49 »

codeulike wrote: post #142
bencollier49 wrote: post #133

Good lord. Old XLS files. I'd love to have seen how this was concocted.

Perhaps some old integration code from 10+ years ago that was written to spit out XLS rather than XLSX e.g. some old versions of Crystal Reports can only do XLS. There must be loads old systems around that can only do XLS

I suppose someone had written a VBA macro to import all the CSV files and then save them in a format which could be imported into some dated upstream system. Or never changed how they worked. Could even be because Excel does something slightly more rigorous with XLSX files which made writing the VBA trickier.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#156

Post by jjkaczor »

codeulike wrote: post #142
bencollier49 wrote: post #133

Good lord. Old XLS files. I'd love to have seen how this was concocted.

Perhaps some old integration code from 10+ years ago that was written to spit out XLS rather than XLSX e.g. some old versions of Crystal Reports can only do XLS. There must be loads old systems around that can only do XLS

XLSX files have been around for ... nearly 13-years...

Ugh - I still deal with clients who are creating brand new XLS and DOC files and expecting to have all the latest features (co-authoring when hosted in 365/SharePoint Online/OneDrive/Teams)...

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#158

Post by neilwilson »

maverickJ wrote: post #25

Interesting. We might see an increase in the amount of wrongly reported data as a result of the global lockdown. One can only wonder what the consequences of data underreporting might be? This reminds me of the below event which you can read the full story at https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/making-investment-de... In 1976, the UK government, led by James Callaghan of the Labour, borrowed the sum of $3.9 billi…

And of course they would never needed to have borrowed at all if they had just let Sterling float and not taken a us dollar denominated loan in 1975.

The problem was a government still operating as though Britton Woods was in place five years after Nixon ended it

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#159

Post by shadowgovt »

aphrax wrote: post #134

I've been bitten by this exact issue (albeit on non critical data), save a file as XLS it will silently drop rows beyond 65k - save it as XLSX and it's all good..

The silent part there is the real surprising part to me. You'd think the exporter would die noisily if it still had data in the buffer and it ran out of file.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#160

Post by TeMPOraL »

libraryatnight wrote: post #123
callamdelaney wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a user issue, it's a government incompetence issue. Who was the technical genius who thought 'right, we need to store thousands of lines of critical and important data, I know! Excel!'

In my org excel might have been the start, the intent being to move over to a DB once someone got it stood up. Then nobody would stand up the DB - because not urgent, we have the excel for now. The DB would be completely forgotten, and 3 years down the road everybody would be wondering wtf we have this huge excel file for. Then we would have six weeks of meetings to discuss the file until something else comes up and…

That's why Excel wins. Because it's right there, infinitely adaptable to any change in workflow you may need to make. No need to send official requests through half a dozen layers of management to get the IT people to maybe, in half a year, add a column to the database. No need to involve 20 people for a year to create new software for a new workflow. You just agree with your co-workers on a change, swap a column, add some color, File->Save, done. It wins because it puts power in the hands of the people doing the work.
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