My point about custom software might have been unclear. Here's what I meant. A one-off ticketing app is a classic example of software that would normally get de

My point about custom software might have been unclear. Here's what I meant. A one-off ticketing app is a classic example of software that would normally get developed either in a spreadsheet or as some custom app that a team would build for the occasion. Such custom apps are typically bad at data validation and error handling, so it's plausible that the same typo would have had the same effect outside of Excel. When I read that Eusprig literature on spreadsheet errors a few years ago, it seemed to me of rather low quality. Certainly many spreadsheets contain errors, but what are we comparing this to? Software in general contains errors. Custom app software—the only alternative to spreadsheets in most cases—tends to be of poor quality and is very expensive compared to spreadsheets. So it's far from clear that spreadsheets are a bad tradeoff. Programmers take it for granted that "proper" software is better than spreadsheets, but I think that is mostly bias. Intellectually and technically, spreadsheets are low-status. Among users, on the other hand, they're high-status, for very good and deep reasons. I'm also biased. I think that these problems need to be solved by innovation within the spreadsheet space itself.