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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

#271

Post by ClumsyPilot »

rvba wrote: post #253
SomaticPirate wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, who is qualified to use Excel if both scientists and economists frequently have errors in their published works? https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/09/07/excel-er...

Umm, who is qualified to write programs in any programming language, if both programmers and developers frequently have errors in their code? https://cve.mitre.org/cve/

That exactly right, noone is. Thats why noone uses C++ or javascript in safety critical devices Even in 'normal' industry its is a huge problem and we need safer languages, i.e. Rust (merits to be seen)

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

#272

Post by hinkley »

rudedogg wrote: post #252
rvba wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is so stupid that someone could make a copy-pasta of it, e.g. "I tried to write a program in C++ but it didn't want to compile, so I spent 90 minutes poking at the code, looking for the error and never did find it. I don't know what the right solution is to this sort of problem, at least for developers. ------------------- "I don't know how to use Excel (most popular spreadsheet program used for budgeting),…

This reminds me of developers talking about the git CLI. At some point you have to stop blaming the users.

I wish I could remember the movie (it appears to be a reference to Al Capone, of all people), but there's a scene that gave me the tingles. The leading man, about to exact some revenge, turns to the antagonist and says,

"You've mistaken my kindness for weakness."

If I worked at a mental health technician I'd be complaining about how bad the system is for trauma survivors and neuro-atypical individuals. But I'm not. I'm a developer who has focused on - or been forced to look at - people struggling with User- and Developer-Experience issues for much of my career. If I'm talking to you about your struggles, you get sympathy. If I'm talking about policy, or policy makers, I'm going to give you a taste of what my 'customers' have to go through every day. And I'm not going to feel a bit sorry about it. If you dismiss it, we may have a problem.

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

#273

Post by dgudkov »

callamdelaney wrote: post #105
beagle3 wrote: post #85

This is indeed user incompetence, but so far every news source quoted the official PR and said it was an "Excel Problem". Microsoft PR was caught unprepared - I wonder how they'll re-spin it in the next few days (and for the first time that I can recall, a Microsoft product was wrongly blamed...) Pay attention, how every time there's a Windows virus or worm, it's a "Computer Virus", but in the (extremely rare) occasi…

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!'

Of course Excel. What else non-technical users can use? They simply don't have any other data tool.

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

#274

Post by rvba »

hinkley wrote: post #257
joosters wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made two different spreadsheets, they came up with different results, and you're blaming Microsoft for the error? Really? Excel, whether you like it or loathe it, is in such wide use around the world that $300 math errors would have been noticed a very long time ago. I could believe that there are still many lurking bugs with obscure corner cases, nasty floating point rounding minutiae and so on, but I would bet…

But they aren't noticed. The classic blunder is dropping the last item off of a summation, and nobody notices until they add another item and things look janky. Those happen all the time, we just only hear about it when the consequences are outsize.

You are writing about a problem that can be solved if you know what you are doing:

Store your data in a table ( https://www.contextures.com/xlExcelTable01.html ), then make a pivot table out of it.

You will never have problems with missing data.

In fact good practice is to add a check, just to see if your pivot table was refreshed and the data there matches the data in the source table. Just like you make tests in software.

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

#275

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mhandley wrote: post #32

The article states that it is not known where in the country was affected, but I think we can deduce that. Here are the daily cases by specimen date. Dotted line is Saturday's data, solid line is Sunday's. The difference between the two is partly the normal daily update, but around 2/3 of it is correcting the underreporting: 7-day moving average: http://danger.handley.org.uk/misc/rates-uk-recent.png Raw data: http://…

Nit: presumably whatever the maximum time is before results is the period in which updates to past results should be expected. I think it's about 1 week at present?

Before the recent leap in cases my test took 6 days to come back (negative). My wife's test at the same time came back the next day. At the time they were saying that 72 hours was the expected return time for results. For me it has been a couple of days of steadily worsening coughing, and I gather people take about 3days-1week to show symptoms ordinarily.

So UK results are most likely reflecting infections from 1-2 weeks ago.

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

#276

Post by andor »

TwoBit wrote: post #157
mark-r wrote: post #139

Friends don't let friends use Excel. Unfortunately Excel is the great swiss army knife of software and it's hard to avoid.

And what do they use instead of Excel? LibreOffice? Some expensive custom database software?

Ask a professional when the stakes are too high. Hire a developer.

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

#277

Post by ClumsyPilot »

redwall_hp wrote: post #240
piannucci wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, my God. "On Error Resume Next" is one of my earliest memories of learning to program for Windows. It never occurred to me that it might result in deaths.

That's an interesting ethical point in CS: sure, you didn't intend the software you hacked together in an afternoon to be used in anything with life-and-death consequences. But that doesn't mean someone isn't going to come along later and use it, without ever even looking at the source, for something very critical down the line. I wonder how many bleeding edge master branches of GitHub repos, pulled in blindly by som…

People have died from using unsuitable contruction materials or devices, that were never designed to be used that way.

It's not the fault of the original designer if he was clearly targetting a different purpose.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

airstrike wrote: post #269
dllthomas wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've re-read the parent comment a few times, and I really don't see how this is your takeaway. The author is complaining that they find Excel difficult to inspect and different spreadsheets difficult to compare. There's no claim that Excel did a calculation wrong.

> The author is complaining that they find [insert-least-favorite-programming-language] difficult to inspect and different [programs] difficult to compare. There's no claim that [least-favorite-programming-language] did a calculation wrong.

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by threatripper »

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #260
threatripper wrote: post #208

People keep putting the blame on Excel but it supports more columns than most implementations of SQL databases. MySQL for example supports only 4096 columns. SQLite defaults to 2000. That's way less than Excel's 16384.

True, but they don't need to relate 16384 types of data. It sounds like they were using one column per record, rather than one row per record. So if they had a sensible data model 2000 columns should be more than sufficient.

You're on to something. The number of tables in MySQL, SQLite, and Excel are virtually unlimited. It seems like that is the lowest common divider ensuring compatibility and data integrity when case numbers grow beyond bounds.

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

#280

Post by croes »

airstrike wrote: post #268
hinkley wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they aren't noticed. The classic blunder is dropping the last item off of a summation, and nobody notices until they add another item and things look janky. Those happen all the time, we just only hear about it when the consequences are outsize.

You could say the same thing about writing tests. There's nothing wrong with Excel. Build an organized spreadsheet with clear separation of data and presentation, and write checks throughout and you will end up with a perfectly error-free workbook.

Nothing wrong? Excel autoconverts values if it thinks it knows the data type of a column and Excel treats 1900 as a leap year. Genetic researchers changed the names of genes to prevent auzoconveesion errors.
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