571–580 of 834 posts
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Quoting doesn't work. Try opening this CSV with Excel: a,b "01",01 Excel interprets both as the same number–1.
The correct way to generate a CSV cell with a leading 0 is ="01" You can verify this with 01,"01",="01"
All previous major spreadsheet screwups were costing money (largest being $6 billion in losses due to a excel formula mishap) , but this one is playing with lives :( 5 – London Olympics Oversells Swimming Event by 10,000 Tickets 4- Banking powerhouse Barclay’s accidentally bought 179 more contracts than they intended in their purchase of Lehman Brothers assets in 2008. Someone hid cells containing the unwanted contra…
Is it really that hard to spend 5 minutes setting up a decent database? Use sqlite if you really want something simple. I guess you still have to understand locking (especially on distributed filesystems.) I've certainly seen people mess that up with spreadsheets.
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Well, not exactly like non-Excel systems are bulletproof either. Entire Japanese stock market went down last week, and it's not like there was a flood of people on HN bemoaning that. At least with Reinhart and Rogoff et al you have a responsible party. As opposed to 'nameless machine failed, and nameless backup machine also failed, and now it's in JIRA so don't worry about it'. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/busi…
I think similar to “code smells” in software engineering, using excel for critical data pipeline work can be considered a “data smell”. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it’s a signal that something may have gone seriously wrong with the data engineering process.
You'd be surprised to hear how many big organisations still use Excel for their reporting needs. I used to worked at a company with 35000 employees. Their payroll reports were generated using a MS Access database and reported using Excel. It was a massive manual job every week as they'd weekly, fortnightly and monthly payroll cycles! It's very easy to lose files and/or make an error in the calculations. But nobody bo…
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The correct way to generate a CSV cell with a leading 0 is ="01" You can verify this with 01,"01",="01"
“Correct” is a strong word. It isn’t defined in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 so Excel should not try to be smart and add extensions only they support.
As for the actual RFC, it's worth taking a read. Any sort of value interpretation is left up to the implementation, to the extent that Excel's behavior in interpreting formulae is 100% in compliance with the spec.
I work in healthcare and by far the biggest production issues we've ever run into are people who run Excel spreadsheets through our file processing where the leading zero's have been removed from patient identifiers because that's Excel's default behavior and you CANNOT TURN IT OFF! EDIT: I have no idea who downvoted my post because what I said is 100% true. We have to tell customers to stop opening CSVs in Excel and…
It’s not Excel’s fault in any possible way. It’s the creator of the spreadsheet. Nothing wrong with using Excel for this kind of task but you must be aware of its limitations and plan accordingly (which would be painfully easy to do by putting smaller data sets in separate workbooks and summarizing from a larger one).
One might say that before you touch a computer or any data or software, you must be aware of the very concept of limitations. People who aren’t shouldn’t be touching such things. These are the same people who fill up their Gmail and can’t believe they should actually PAY for more storage. Send them back to FarmVille.
A DB system that doesn't verify that each submitted record has been included in the DB (and scream if it hasn't) ... is a DB cruising for a bruising.
If that sounds insane, I assure you that is a simplified version of what happens in some systems.
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I think similar to “code smells” in software engineering, using excel for critical data pipeline work can be considered a “data smell”. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it’s a signal that something may have gone seriously wrong with the data engineering process.
On the other hand, its more like "nobody ever got fired for using excel"