"But you wouldn't use XLS. Nobody would start with that."
Oh. "Every" sales and business person probably would. Probably.
Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
311–320 of 834 posts
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#312Excel? Really? They are using that crap for nation wide reporting? Wow, mind blown. Epic fail.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#313People 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.
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Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can find idiosyncrasies about any tool. Excel is a fine tool for 99% of use cases. Sure, it's quirky here and there, but the sheer amount of work that gets done globally in Excel should be testament enough to its value. Highlighting edge cases to bash on the tool is either myopic or intellectually dishonest
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#315It’s fun to point and laugh, but is this really just the consequence of an unprecedented health emergency demanding a rush job?
As far as bugs go, it doesn’t sound that bad. They didn’t lose data - they just processed it late? And they spotted it within days/weeks, and have a workaround/correction already? And it’s only the reporting that was wrong, not the more important part where they inform people of results?
I’d rather have this system now than be waiting for the requirements analysis to conclude on the perfect system.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And JavaScript autoconverts all your numbers to floats, introducing errors every time you touch them. Meanwhile most other popular languages will happily wrap your fixed-size integers around on overflow, or silently perform integer division with truncation when you don't append a decimal fraction part manually to any of the numbers.
Point being, all tools come with strange caveats that one needs to be familiar with. A nice feature of Excel is that the caveats are visible, because unlike writing code, Excel is reactive and interactive.
I mean, some of the stuff Excel does to your data is downright idiotic wrt. the common use cases, and probably exists only for the sake of backwards compatibility. But let's not pretend you don't need to pay attention if using a tool you're not proficient with.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont know what is your point? Defending guy who wrote an useless story, how he used Excel once, didn't know what he is doing so something went wrong and then his conclusion is that Excel sucks? Millions of people use the program every day, it has its own fair share of problems (like everything), but if random Karens in any corporation can learn how to use it, then you should expect the same from a random programmer…
Random Karens don't create complex spreadsheets. They copy paste numbers into a spreadsheet someone else has created for them.
The person above was making a home budget (and failed) - which also is not a complex spreadsheet.
Also, you could probably find 10 different templates in google.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#318Each test result creating several rows of data seems like a problem too. In clean data, every observation is one row. It makes working with the dataset much easier. In this scenario, I would expect one observation to correspond to one test result. The multiple rows are then better off pivoted into columns.
Looking from an outside perspective I would agree, but in practice we don't actually know what this dataset is, so several things rows per test may make sense in the context of this stage of the data processing.
It never ceases to amaze me how often we as developers are quick to point out other people's obviously incorrect decisions, only to defend our own Rube Goldberg implementations 30 minutes later by pointing out that critics just don't understand the design constraints.
Or at least how often my peers do that. Obviously all of my systems and code are perfect.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#319The problem is that anyone who isn't a decent coder think excel is a sensible choice for this, because they've seen it in their school or work. So when the proposals come in, you're going to see one guy who says it's all common sense and we use familiar old excel for everything, and another lunatic who says something called "pigsqueal" is actually the standard, connected to a "frontend" which for some reason is now s…
Your scenario makes it seem like these things are the result of incompetence or stupidity by people who aren't "decent coders". The reality is that for most use cases excel+manual processes are perfectly adequate/have little startup costs and what you're suggesting is grossly over engineered/require immense initial investment.
The real problem is if/when scope begins to increase these processes are sufficient until they aren't, and the tools aren't flexible enough to gracefully manage the transition.
Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
#320The problem is that anyone who isn't a decent coder think excel is a sensible choice for this, because they've seen it in their school or work. So when the proposals come in, you're going to see one guy who says it's all common sense and we use familiar old excel for everything, and another lunatic who says something called "pigsqueal" is actually the standard, connected to a "frontend" which for some reason is now s…
Look, you’re right that Excel shouldn’t be used for this. But even then, Excel definitely could be used for this.
We’re not talking big data here. We’re talking about a finite number of possible test result from a finite set of testing locations grouped on a daily basis. Let’s say 1000 test locations, where each location has a daily number of tests performed divided into “positive”, “negative”, “inconclusive” and maybe a few other options. That’s ~5000 data points per day. Should not be any problem.
However, you need to properly plan ahead about how you design your spreadsheet, how to format the columns, how to keep it performant and how to not save it in some godawful 25 year old memory-dump dumpster fire of a file format...