UK Covid-19 data underreported due to file size limit exceeded

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

zelos wrote: post #11

mellosouls wrote: post #9

Note: for all the people reckoning this is an Excel issue as reported on Twitter: a) The Twitter link is referencing the Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8805697/Furious-bla... b) The Mail does not source it's claim. c) All those Excel references in the news seem to postdate (at time of writing) speculation on Excel in IT-heavy forums like this. While I can believe the Excel conjecture is correct,…

I hope you're right, but most reports do at least mention "exceeding maximum file size". That seems like a fairly basic error: what reasonable (national-scale) data storage formats would have an arbitrary file size limit?

Post by dang » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #23

mellosouls wrote: post #9

Note: for all the people reckoning this is an Excel issue as reported on Twitter: a) The Twitter link is referencing the Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8805697/Furious-bla... b) The Mail does not source it's claim. c) All those Excel references in the news seem to postdate (at time of writing) speculation on Excel in IT-heavy forums like this. While I can believe the Excel conjecture is correct,…

BBC say they have 'confirmed' it's Excel, though still a bit mysterious on how they've done that: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54422505 Particularly, they reckon they were using the older XLS rather than XLSX format with the lower 65000 row limit - although that seems more like a deflection from the fact functionality limits weren't properly handled, tested or designed for.