Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

MS Excel internally represents dates as a floating point number from epoch of Jan 1 1900

So "40335" or "40335.0" is +40,335 days from that epoch -- which is June 10 2006.

An experienced Excel user often runs into "mysterious 5 digit numbers" from 3xxxx to 4xxxx and will instinctively think it's probably a date that's inadvertently formatted/interpreted as a number. By switching the formatting of that cell to "Date" (Excel right-click "Format cells..." choose Category "Date"), the mystery number becomes a readable mm/dd/yyyy.

Same idea as experienced programmers coming across a 10-digit number like "1602930678" in a JSON or XML data file and instinctively assume it's probably a UNIX timestamp rather than a phone number with area code (160).

Choices are:

(a) spend a day drafting a rough spreadsheet, then over the next months tinker with it making it a bit better, more efficient and add more relevant functionalities.

(b) put in a formal project request to IT. This will be put into the backlog, and most probably classified as non priority unless there is some lobbying from people with clout to 'get this done'. When accepted, usually months or even years later, it will be analyzed at length by a business analyst that is unfamiliar with the problems that need to be solved, handed over to a programmer (or worse, an external contract) that will implement something that will have 30 assumptions filling the holes in the analysis, be accepted by the analyst and then thrown over to the poor user that will have to figure out if something, anything relevant to the job can be done with it. The user can start asking for corrections or rewrites, but since most of the operation is CYA from start to finish has a high chance of being berated for 'wasting the companies resources' (after all, this project that could have been done in a day with a spreadsheet has now already cost the org 200k or more in the least, a significant amount of that went to the IT dept's internal platform rewrites that they are desperate to do but never get budget for from the business) and with high probability land the user on the 'difficult/nagging' people list of the IT dept.

Every few years the enterprise will launch an initiative to 'clean up all our processes', typically when a new key manager moves in with 'friendly' IT contractors that he was palls with at his previous place, and they'll start with an inventory of all the 'shadow IT' (spreadsheets, Access DB solutions, homebrew VB programs, some SaaS stuff ...) in order to purge and consolidate all onto the shiny new ERP/BPM/... platfrom that was sold to the CxO. The new platform a few dozen million dollars later will (if successful) deliver maybe 33% of the required functionality, and the users can either 'let the business fail to show the nobheads that it is an impossible system to run the business on' or, more likely, keep using their spreadsheets and other quick fix solutions to keep the business running despite.