Spreadsheet Screw-ups (or bad choice of Excel for serious purposes)

Well.

This is incredibly stupid.

The original tweet from 2017

:joy:

This is…actually painful. Wow.

1 Like

detroit continues to deliver on its perception

1 Like

I, what, how. Isn’t this significantly harder and worse than… just about everything? Ctrl-T mf-er, and that’s not even the best solution, hell just use a numpad. Call up your child on our landline and have them input it and email it to you on your dialup.

IMO,

may indeed be a cool thing to write, but

more than negates the initial coolness of

especially since the whole thing was copping to an error in one of said spreadsheets.

Overall negative cool points. :judge:

Let me introduce you to the concept of irony:

This seems like a good place to vent. I was asked in the spring to stand up a strawman model to do valuation of prospective contracts with payers. Cool. So I did that, and then after I delivered it, it seemed to die on the vine.

What I didn’t know is that someone took it and ran with it. They hired an intern and had them working on it over the summer. They made some pretty serious errors in the arithmetic, ugh. And they had one assumption that you could enter into the thing, but that cell had no dependents.

People were actively using this to evaluate some reasonably large contracts, I’d say we’ve made decisions on ~$10M of business based on a deeply flawed model. :man_facepalming:

4 Likes

Early on in my career, I made some tools that were too easy to use.

I moved files at one point, and got a call from Colorado: “Where did the files go?!??!”

Me: “Who are you, and why are you using my spreadsheets?”

The next time I made a tool that left my hands, I locked that sucker down (well, I only “locked” it, sans password, because that usually scared off people who didn’t know anything) with data validations, message boxes, and more. But that was where I explicitly knew other people would be using my files after me.

1 Like

Wow, I did the exact same thing years ago, locked down everything except the desired inputs.

I enjoyed getting emailed every quarter or so, my name was on the file. Someone got the tool and either didn’t understand it or was trying to change locked things. It was at least a proxy for me to know who was using the tool, and for what.

1 Like

I don’t put my name in the filename – usually put it on the documentation/notes page.

1 Like

North Liberty property owners are paying a total of about $234,000 more in property taxes this fiscal year than the City Council intended because staff forgot to count money the city already had on hand.

In August, city staff realized the certified property tax rate for fiscal 2022 — which began July 1 — was 19 cents higher than what the North Liberty City Council intended. The council had agreed to a city tax of $11.32 per $1,000 in taxable property value, but instead a rate of $11.51 per $1,000 was certified.

Due to a spreadsheet input error, the city’s reserve funds were not applied as intended, City Administrator Ryan Heiar wrote in a memo to council members.

mmm manual processes…

Thought of you guys.

…He recalled that a colleague once described to others that Sutter “built the most ridiculously complicated Excel spreadsheet I’ve ever seen in my life.”

1 Like

The lock spreadsheet unfortunately doesn’t always work.

For our annual budgeting process, us in the actuarial department will send out a template to sales which requires them to key in monthly sales figures for 1-year and annual figures for the following 4 years.

We of course locked the spreadsheet, leaving only the cells they were supposed to key in.
For some reason we got requests all round to unlock the spreadsheet. We were a bit wary but the Appointed Actuary went “fine, no reason to keep secrets” and we released the passwords with some misgivings.

When I got the spreadsheets back, I noticed that for one of them, the sum of the monthly sales figures doesn’t equal the annual figure reported (which in the original locked spreadsheet was of course just a simple SUM). The cell with the annual figure was overridden with a hardcoded number and the monthly numbers didn’t sum up.

I rang up the department asking them which was correct - the monthly numbers or the annual numbers? I got a pretty patronising “oh, so you guys made a mistake in your spreadsheet”. I would have screamed at that guy, if only he wasn’t an SVP and me a mere junior manager…

5 Likes

Solution: Any locked documents you send, macro to allow to it be unlocked with a locked cell with bold red text containing, “This document was unprotected by XX on date XX at time XX and no longer belongs to the original creator.”

2 Likes

Maybe it’s just me, the idea of having 180 linked spreadsheets seems just a tad risky.

We really need the :yikes: emoji.

:astonished: just doesn’t cut it.

2 Likes

Actually despite my “yikes” reaction… for years I did maintain a spreadsheet that linked to a crap ton of other spreadsheets now that I think about it.

We were basically managing claims in Excel and had a summary spreadsheet that pulled the totals from all of the others.

I’d regularly point out to auditors how not secure that was and how easy it would be for me to defraud the company of several million dollars before anyone figured out what I was doing. And how easy it would be to migrate the claims to an actual claims system with safeguards preventing that sort of fraud. Took them about 10 or 12 years to finally get around to it.

1 Like

When they finally did, it probably only took them about five minutes to fix it.

I doubt it.

But the people throwing up the roadblock probably spent less time on fixing it than they’d spent on justifying why they weren’t going to fix it over the years.

That’s not saying much though.

Also, that was (what I thought was) obvious hyperbole from well over a decade ago. Maybe consider getting over it.

1 Like