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How Not to Kill People With Spreadsheets: outsourcing gone wrong
- jaclaz 6y agoSo after all, it seems like it was not strictly an Excel issue, but rather the unknown automated tool[1] that transformed .csv's with more than 65,536 lines into the "old" .xls format (that does have a known 65.536 line limit) truncating data (evidently without reporting any error or warning). And of course the "dashboards" using .xls data as input seem a lot like an unfortunate choice. As a side note, it seems to me perplexing that 65,536 rows can contain only 1,400 patients' data, that is 65,536/1,400= 46 lines per patient, so even the original .csv must have been more similar to a .ini file than to a common (multicolumn) .csv. [1] which could be still an Excel "automated" by some scripting
- davidgerard 6y agoauthor here - it's not clear what the actual software was, and it doesn't appear Excel was actually to blame. The real problem was that this was heroic gaffer-tape to work around completely unnecessary problems. (also, a tech error crept into the article - LO doesn't automatically fix Excel's crappy math, it just has alternate formulae that behave correctly that you can use instead of Excel's broken ones: multiple variants of FLOOR, CEILING, WEEKNUM, some of the fancier statistical stuff I think. I've flagged the error to the editor.)