Sure, but what about excel?
whenever i get a spreadsheet from someone else, i look for hidden cells. and the titles to any linked files (that I usually don’t have).
Sample Excel VBA. The adaptation of this to the scenario described is left as an exercise for the reader.
Sometimes they break links to the outside files so it pastes some of the results as values.
Then you spend hours scouring the workbook with multiple tabs to find why the results look a little off.
EUCs (End user controls) were developed to improve that sort of issue.
Putney election result had missed out 6,500 votes
Summary
A “spreadsheet issue” led to more than 6,500 votes being missed from the declaration of the election result in Putney.
Labour’s Fleur Anderson held the south London seat in the 4 July contest, receiving what was announced on the night as 20,952 against Conservative Lee Roberts’ total of 10,011.
But on Wednesday, Wandsworth Council revealed that it had mistakenly failed to include 6,558 votes in the totals, publishing revised results on its website.
The missing votes did not affect the overall result, with Ms Anderson still emerging as the winner and with a larger majority of 12,488 votes over Mr Roberts.
She received a total of 24,113 votes, while Mr Roberts received 11,625. Third-placed Kieren McCarthy, the Liberal Democrat candidate, saw his total increase from 5,189 to 5,943.
A statement on Wandsworth Council’s website said: "We acknowledge a spreadsheet issue that resulted in not all the properly counted and allocated votes being included in the announcement on the night in the Putney election count for the General Election 2024.
"This was identified and the figures on this page have been updated. This did not affect the result or the order of the candidates.
“While we are confident this was an isolated incident we are taking this opportunity to review processes with a particular focus on spreadsheet procedures.”
Wandsworth’s Conservative Party expressed anger at the mistake and called for a full explanation from the council.
Aled Richards-Jones, leader of the Conservative group on Wandsworth Council, said: "Previous elections in Wandsworth have been won by a handful of votes - three years ago, a by-election in Tooting was won by a single vote, demonstrating how important it is that every vote is counted.
"Yet today, residents have been told - without any explanation - that 6,558 votes essentially went missing during the counting process.
“Wandsworth residents deserve urgent clarification about how an error of this magnitude could have occurred, why it wasn’t detected at the time and the steps the council is taking to ensure this can never happen again.”
Oh, that little Bobby Tables…
https://www.thelocal.fr/20240813/the-fake-french-town-in-dordogne-forced-to-change-its-name
The ‘fake’ French town in Dordogne forced to change its name
Repeated spreadsheet errors have forced the town of Faux in south-west France to change its name, the mayor has announced.
Faux = False
The town mayor, Alain Legal, told regional news outlet Sud Ouest that ‘Faux’ (which means ‘fake’ or ‘false’ in English) randomly went missing when put into digital files or spreadsheets - after some IT programmes apparently read it as a command, not a name.
“It led to a lot of confusion and errors,” Legal said, explaining that some residents did not receive letters.
On top of that, there is another French town called Faux-la-Montagne in the Creuse département, and sometimes people called the town hall looking to reach the other ‘Faux’ municipality.
The town will become Faux-en-Périgord, referencing the historic region name of south-west France, famed for its production of duck and foie gras.
Faux is one of eight French municipalities which will change their names on January 1st, according to a decree published in France’s Journal Officiel this week.
This is not related to the updating of street names, which happened in June 2024, as that part of a law requiring small communes to allocate formal addresses to houses on the estimated 200,000 or so streets with no name.
The most common reason for a name change is to avoid confusion with other places of the same name.
The municipality of Saint-Christophe-sur-Dolaison in the Haute-Loire département will become Saint-Christophe-sur-Dolaizon.
This is partially for historical reasons, as it was originally spelled with a Z instead of an S, but it is also avoid confusion surrounding the spelling, as the town is located near the Dolaizon river, Le Parisien reported.
In the Seine-et-Marne département - Montcourt-Fromonville - will become Moncourt-Fromonville. This is reportedly to fix the spelling so it matches what inhabitants commonly use (no ‘T’).
Other towns wished to avoid being confused with similar sounding places. In order to do so, the most prudent option seemed to be adding a geographical description to the town’s name.
For example, the town of Rousset in Hautes-Alpes will become Rousset-Serre-Ponçon, to avoid confusion with the Rousset in Bouches-du-Rhône and to reference the nearby lake.
Then there’s Grigny in the Rhône département, which no longer wishes to be mixed up with the Grigny in Essonne. This town will henceforth be known as Grigny-sur-Rhône.
The mayor, Xavier Odo, told Le Parisien that they “regularly receive letters not meant for us (…) the goal is not meant to erase 55 years of Communist history in our town, but rather to recall the 20 centuries of shared life between Grigny and the river”.
The Grigny in Essonne - greater Paris - is well-known as a leftist stronghold, having been held by the Communist party since 1935. Grigny in the Rhône too used to be a Communist-controlled local authority but these days is controlled by the right-wing Les Républicains party. The mayor had faced accusations of trying to erase the area’s working class history and make his commune appear ‘more bourgeois’ with the name change.
As for the three other towns changing their names, they will also add small descriptions to - Roche in the Loire département will become Roche-en-Forez, Le Cheix in the Puy-de-Dôme département will become Le Cheix-sur-Morge, and Le Vigan in the Lot département will become Le Vigan-en-Quercy.
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Wait until they hear about the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan that connects the upper peninsula to Mackinaw City… but does NOT go to Mackinac Island.
Reminds me of the joke about naming your kid “Robert’); drop table *;–”
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.
Wait until they pronounce Mackinaw and Mackinac (hint: it isn’t Mack-in-ack)
“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, told the hearing held by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation.
“We tried to do that every five minutes, but it was a lot to do.”
In EuSpRIG, we actually like the coverage on this one:
Because of this bit: [I added the bolding]
Review Into Putney Election Error Blames Under Resourcing
Incorrect declaration was due to spreadsheet not being checked
A report into the blunder which led to an incorrect declaration of the Putney constituency result at this year’s General Election has concluded that the council needs to provide more resources at the vote count.
Even though 6,000 votes were excludedon 4 July, the error made no difference to the overall result including the relative position of the candidates but the Chief Executive of Wandsworth borough requested the review from Andrew Maughan, the Borough Solicitor for the London Borough of Camden.
He concluded that while the specific reason for the error was a spreadsheet not being set up correctly, this reflected a deeper problem.
His report states, “To say this occurred because of the spreadsheet is to miss the bigger picture. In my view, the mistake occurred because of a lack of resource being directed to the process. It failed because there was a single point of failure, and no checks or balances built in in terms of the processes prior to and then during the count. “
The person responsible for the spreadsheet, and who Mr Maughan says was the only person who could have verified the calculations, was Andrew Smith, Head of Electoral Services at Wandsworth Council. He said that in future any such calculations should be double checked by someone outside of the elections team.
Mr Smith has acknowledged the error and confirmed that he believes if he had requested more resources, they would have been provided.
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That made the news around here for a few weeks.
=COUNT(AllVotes) = COUNT(A:F)
=FALSE
=COUNT(AllVotes) = COUNT(A:G)
=TRUE
While this is purportedly about Excel history, it is chock full of screw-ups by people using Excel
There was some hand-wringing at MI5 in 2010 when the government admitted that “a formatting fault on an electronic spreadsheet” had led to the Security Service and the Serious Organised Crime Agency to tap 134 incorrect telephone numbers. A user had told the program to round up the numbers so that it changed the last three digits to zeros.
Barclays Capital inadvertently paid millions of pounds in 2008 when it accidentally bought 179 contracts from the bankrupt bank Lehman Brothers because of a spreadsheet error. The spreadsheet contained about 1,000 rows of assets, most of which were marked as “wanted” by Barclays.
The unwanted items were hidden from view in the Excel file but reappeared when an employee converted the file format to PDF and sent it to be filed at court. Barclays had to return to court to get the error reversed.
In 2005, Kodak, the photographic company, admitted that it overpaid a former employee’s severance pay by $11 million because “the wrong formula was applied”, a spokesman said.
“It was definitely unintentional,” the spokesman said, adding that it was a matter of “extra zeros” being entered. Kodak noticed the error before paying out but had begun accounting for it.
…
Even the London 2012 Olympics were susceptible. A clerical error meant organisers offered 10,000 more tickets to a swimming event than were available for the venue, leading to 3,000 customers being upgraded to bigger events.
Whining and complaining about user error, none of which seem to be a fault with Excel. FIX THE USERS!
Analogous to cars and the crashes that occur. Stop driving cars and go back to horses and buggies?
What is the solution for any of these events that would prevent the error AND get the job done?
Paper and pencil?
Here is a fun one from that article:
There was some hand-wringing at MI5 in 2010 when the government admitted that “a formatting fault on an electronic spreadsheet” had led to the Security Service and the Serious Organised Crime Agency to tap 134 incorrect telephone numbers. A user had told the program to round up the numbers so that it changed the last three digits to zeros.
Round up phone numbers?!?!?!?
(Also, innumeracy: if the numbers were “rounded up,” the “thousands’” digit would also change.)
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This made me chuckle today.
so… why did they put passwords in a spreadsheet?
“but the tab was hidden!”
the passwords should never have been in a spreadsheet to begin with
Summary
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office inadvertently posted a spreadsheet to its website with a hidden tab that included voting system passwords.
In a statement to 9NEWS, a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said that “the Department is working to remedy this situation where necessary.”
“The Department took immediate action as soon as it was aware of this and informed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which closely monitors and protects the county’s essential security infrastructure,” the spokesperson said.
On Tuesday morning, Colorado Republican Party Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman shared the hidden tab discovery in a mass email, along with an affidavit from someone who claims they had downloaded the Excel file from the Colorado Secretary of State’s website and discovered the hidden tab by simply clicking “unhide.” The name on the affidavit was blacked out in the Republican Party email.
9NEWS left a voicemail with Scheppelman on Tuesday afternoon.
The passwords that were in the hidden tab are known as BIOS passwords and are one part of the security process for Colorado’s voting machines.
They are passwords needed to configure system settings.
“There are two unique passwords for every election equipment component, which are kept in separate places and held by different parties. Passwords can only be used with physical in-person access to a voting system,” a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said.
“To be very clear, we do not see this as a full security threat to the state. This is not a security threat,” Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold told 9NEWS Tuesday. “There are two passwords to get into any voting component, along with physical access. We have layers of security, and out of just an abundance of caution, have staff in the field changing passwords, looking at access logs and looking at the entire situation and continuing our investigation.”
A prior company of mine had this where everyone’s sql password, which is also the lan password, was automatically saved in a txt file on their c drive.
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