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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

#621

Post by TacoSteemers »

jugg1es wrote: post #538

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…

Maybe it can be solved by prepending "ID:" for exports, and removing it on import. It could be proposed as a convention for all HC software companies.

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

#622

Post by TeMPOraL »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #456
cabalamat wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out. I have a friend who wrote a 641-line long bash script to automate a web site. It doesn't use subroutines anywhere, the body for the program is a 550 line long loop with multiple if statements and loops inside it. He t…

Wha...... What?? What school or book did he read that made him think that was a good idea?

He attended the school of self-reliance. He should be applauded for tackling the challenge and doing the job himself, where otherwise it would likely have not been done at all.

Obviously, he's not a programmer. The script, for us, is bad. Perhaps if something important for him depends on this script working, he should pay a software developer to spend some time cleaning it up.

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

#623

Post by collyw »

swiley wrote: post #528
totaldude87 wrote: post #491

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.

It takes a course to understand how to to use a relational database.

MS Access used to come as standard with Office and is actually the perfect solution to many of the problems that businesses use Excel for. It's very rarely that people actually used Access as Excel was far more intuitive and good enough for many projects especially in the early stages.

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

#624

Post by zelphirkalt »

tasogare wrote: post #558
jugg1es wrote: post #538

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…

Quote your strings. The problem is more with how you generate CSV (which is easy to break in the first place) than Excel’s fault. It’s like writing your identifiers as numbers in JSON instead of string then complain the leading zeros are removed.

Are you asuming creation of CSV? 'cause most excel users wont be aware of why they should store in csv instead of excel's proprietary formats.

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

#625

Post by vertere »

_pmf_ wrote: post #609
vertere wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps by "correct way" you meant "dodgy hack to make Excel happy and risk breaking more sensible implementations"? Excel may predate the RFC but AFAIK MS didn't invent or coin the term CSV, so you can't just say whatever Excel does is correct. The RFC is loose because of nonsense like this, it doesn't mean it was ever a good idea.

Do you want to be a useless sophist or develop software?

I sure don't want to have to deal with people putting `="01"` in CSV files.

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

#626

Post by codeulike »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #497
codeulike wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points Partly I think the Excel bit is news because Excel (and mistakes made with Excel) is easily relatable to people. But bugs always come up and most other bugs are just as stupid. If it had been an off-by-one loop error in some C code somewhere it would be just as dumb but you'd get none of the facepalm memes all over Twitter.

Off by one errors are all alike; every excel error is an error in its own way.

Not when it mixes up US and UK date formats when you import a CSV.

Not when it turns phone numbers into integers and strips off the leading zero.

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

#627

Post by TeMPOraL »

konjin wrote: post #527
icedchai wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I completely agree. That was one of the "couple of problems" in my initial reply!

Pretty common for finance in the 00s and 10s to be honest. It's slowly getting better, but until you fire everyone who isn't on board with this and replace them with people who can at least script - at every level of the business - you're going to have the same problem.

That would be good. But to be honest, Excel is scripting - in a 2D FRP REPL (something structurally more advanced than most programmers are using day to day). If we're changing hiring requirements to test for bash/Python/Powershell competency, why not actually test for Excel competency?

Maybe that's the problem? Excel is so easy to start with that people with no experience think they've mastered it, and the industry doesn't seem to have specified any best practices, much less testing the interviewees for their knowledge of them.

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

#628

Post by willtim »

alexbrower wrote: post #587
willtim wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and "on error resume next" is what I usually see in VBA code

Curious, in what context are you all still using VBA?

I, personally, wouldn't use VBA at all, ever. I would only consider Excel and Word for very simple use cases. For example, I refuse to use Word for technical documentation. But Office and Excel are everywhere in large corporates; and simple tactical spreadsheets turn into monsters over time. One former employer had a spreadsheet "application" where triggering a sheet recalc (accidentally) would take out an entire grid of machines. I've never been in any position to stop this stuff from happening.

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

#629

Post by dtech »

sheetjs wrote: post #576
terwey wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

Excel predates RFC4180 by nearly 20 years (RFC4180 is October 2005, Excel 1.0 was September 1985) and this behavior was already cemented when the RFC was written. 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.

CSV predates Excel, and other CSV implementations don't have this behavior

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

#630

Post by adwww »

mark-r wrote: post #486
adwww wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know many engineers - even in the data team - with an Office license.

I think our company has a company-wide license for Office. When IT sets up a machine you get it automatically. Microsoft works hard to get those kind of setups to be common-place.

Last time I worked in a big corporate you had to fill in a long form to request a license for anything you needed. If you didn't use it again within a fortnight or so it got yoinked away...

The startups I've worked at since have all been big on GSuite.

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