5 ms·

Are people taking this article seriously? I'm fairly certain that it's a tongue-in-cheek jab at various other articles recently blaming Excel for the Reinhart-R

Are people taking this article seriously? I'm fairly certain that it's a tongue-in-cheek jab at various other articles recently blaming Excel for the Reinhart-Rogoff thing. I don't know how anyone could see the last bit about Native Americans and think that the article was actually serious.

gruseom 14y ago
It's serious, though playful. Some of the cases are very interesting, particularly the one about Barclays getting burned by the lack of access control on data in spreadsheets.
- barkingcat 14y ago
  the "hide vs delete" problem is incredibly prevalent in corporate financial statements. Accountants during preparation of these documents often "hide" for a reason - they want to try out how certain numbers work, and want to keep their work-in-progress easily accessible without deleting them. And often corporate secretaries just send out these documents "as ready" without thinking that there's tons of confidential and sometimes very wrong (or very incriminating) numbers "hidden" as work-in-progress. This happens so often on Quarterly financial statements that it's an embarrassment, frankly. Disclaimer: I worked as a lowly proofreader of financial documents, quarterly and annual reports, etc. The problem is not Access Control. The problem is people failing to recognize when a document is "ready for public consumption" vs an internal working draft. The real story of "lacking access control" is when these excel worksheets actually link into MS Access databases hosted inside the firewalls of these companies - and holes were poked in the firewall to let the data out because executives wanted to work on these documents in their lodge in aspen, etc. I see this all the time - it's really freaky when the excel worksheet I was proofreading start reaching out over the net and into supposedly private networks deep within financial houses. If I run something like little snitch, it would show access attempts over nonstandard ports, etc. It's scary.
  - bloblaw 14y ago
    That's also not an Excel issue, but a process/"giving VP's whatever they want even when bad" issue.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    Well, of course "it's always a people problem" as Jerry Weinberg says. But the Barclays example is interesting* precisely for its technical detail. The spreadsheet author used Excel's "hide" feature to hide some data. Had Excel given them the ability to restrict read access to some portion of the sheet, it seems obvious that they would have done that instead. * Interesting to me at least, because I work on things like this. Not contradicting your comment at all.
sctgrhm 14y ago
I agree. It seem to me that the article is taking the Mickey out of these high profile people / companies who are quick to place blame on Excel. I would see most of these a simply human errors which could have been avoided had the people involved been more thorough. If they are able to model complexes financial and economic problems in a spreadsheet surely they are also capable of building safeguards and double checks into their sheets or have someone proof read the results. Evidently, they didn't ... Though luck.
flatfilefan 14y ago
I guess the poing might be where there is no peer review or quality assurance - these cultures are prone to produce this kind of errors. And Excel culture is most of the time a one man show for every spreadsheet. They are hard to audit.

gruseom 14y ago

It's serious, though playful. Some of the cases are very interesting, particularly the one about Barclays getting burned by the lack of access control on data in spreadsheets.

barkingcat 14y ago
the "hide vs delete" problem is incredibly prevalent in corporate financial statements. Accountants during preparation of these documents often "hide" for a reason - they want to try out how certain numbers work, and want to keep their work-in-progress easily accessible without deleting them. And often corporate secretaries just send out these documents "as ready" without thinking that there's tons of confidential and sometimes very wrong (or very incriminating) numbers "hidden" as work-in-progress. This happens so often on Quarterly financial statements that it's an embarrassment, frankly. Disclaimer: I worked as a lowly proofreader of financial documents, quarterly and annual reports, etc. The problem is not Access Control. The problem is people failing to recognize when a document is "ready for public consumption" vs an internal working draft. The real story of "lacking access control" is when these excel worksheets actually link into MS Access databases hosted inside the firewalls of these companies - and holes were poked in the firewall to let the data out because executives wanted to work on these documents in their lodge in aspen, etc. I see this all the time - it's really freaky when the excel worksheet I was proofreading start reaching out over the net and into supposedly private networks deep within financial houses. If I run something like little snitch, it would show access attempts over nonstandard ports, etc. It's scary.
- bloblaw 14y ago
  That's also not an Excel issue, but a process/"giving VP's whatever they want even when bad" issue.
- gruseom 14y ago
  Well, of course "it's always a people problem" as Jerry Weinberg says. But the Barclays example is interesting* precisely for its technical detail. The spreadsheet author used Excel's "hide" feature to hide some data. Had Excel given them the ability to restrict read access to some portion of the sheet, it seems obvious that they would have done that instead. * Interesting to me at least, because I work on things like this. Not contradicting your comment at all.

sctgrhm 14y ago

I agree. It seem to me that the article is taking the Mickey out of these high profile people / companies who are quick to place blame on Excel. I would see most of these a simply human errors which could have been avoided had the people involved been more thorough. If they are able to model complexes financial and economic problems in a spreadsheet surely they are also capable of building safeguards and double checks into their sheets or have someone proof read the results. Evidently, they didn't ... Though luck.

flatfilefan 14y ago

I guess the poing might be where there is no peer review or quality assurance - these cultures are prone to produce this kind of errors. And Excel culture is most of the time a one man show for every spreadsheet. They are hard to audit.