UK Government loses data because of Excel mistake.

My previous video: When Spreadsheets Attack!

Seth's shout-out is at 14:15 here:

This tweet has not aged well:
"sometimes instead of finding and learning how to use a chisel, you turn to the hammer you’re already holding"

The tweets were in relation to: Complex Fibonacci Numbers?

=IF(use = critical, "Formal Software Engineering Process", IF(use = important, "Use a database", "have fun with spreadsheets!"))
- Dr Simon Thorne, programme chair of the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group

My video offering YouTube filming advice: Why are Talk-Show Hosts so Bad at YouTube? A Closer Look

CORRECTIONS
- At 03:23 I say "36,536" when the correct number of rows in an .xls file is "65,536". The on-screen number is correct!
- at 06:13 and again at 10:04 I say "National Health England" instead of the correct "Public Health England". I have no idea why my brain did that. I think it merged NHS with PHE.

As always: thanks to Jane Street who support my channel. They're amazing.

Filming, editing and graphics by Alex Genn-Bash
Spreadsheet ad performed by Gemma Arrowsmith
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson
"Spreadsheets" packaging by Matt Parker

MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician

[hectobit]

There even is a spreadsheet keeping track of people who died because of spreadsheets. The total number is fourteenth of March 2013.

[shirinkaul]

Okay, governments of the World, repeat after me:


Excel is not a database.

[ChrisHightower]

As a local government IT developer, I can take a guess as to how this happened.
1. Management of public health departments says "We need a tool to track these cases, and we need it yesterday"
2. Developers reply: "We can get you a tool for that quickly, but it won't be very robust. We'll call that Phase 1. Phase 2 will be a real DB driven application."
3. Management says "Great! Do that"
4. Phase I Excel based solution is designed an put in place in less than 1 week.
5. Developers start on "Phase 2"
6. Management says, forget phase 2, what we have "works". We'll live with it until the end of this pandemic.
7. Problems arise, data is lost, chaos ensues.

[ravencloud]

" I wasnt running a life critical database in a time of national crisis "

Throwing some shade today!

[gimli]

Holy crap, that ad halfway through was the best excel shitpost I've ever seen. Absolutely outstanding!

[Vendavalez]

The worst thing about this is that the person who probably insisted on using something else is going to get in trouble for not using something else and nothing is going to happen to the person who said "why do you always want to overcomplicate everything? Just use a spreadsheet."

[adsoyad]

I genuinely thought "European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group" was a joke –nope, it's real. They even have a 'horror stories' tab on their site, simply beautiful

[playhard]

That ad was so convincing, I started searching for skip button.

[SehnsuchtYT]

I swear Excel's autocorrect date function has driven me close to insanity

[loganstrong]

"Spreadsheets: from the makers of Wordart." Absolutely brilliant.

[MrDavekatz]

Somebody needs to write "a spreadsheet is not a database" 200 times on the blackboard (or maybe 65, 536 times?)

[BrainyBrunetteBarbie]

As an accountant, I really wish “The Spreadsheet News Network” was a thing.

Also, thumbs up on the “Eats #DIV/0! for breakfast”. That gave a chuckle.

[TheEgovice]

Is nobody else here concerned about the casual refrences to 'Recreational' Maths? Won't someone think of the children! First they'll start doing some casual additions in their parents basement, but before you know they'll be into the hard maths, doing fourier transforms on chalk boards!!

[TheLastSheikah]

"You can justify data in a spreadsheet; there's even a button for it"
This is one of those times where I suddenly got the joke, two hours after watching the video >.<

[tiggerbiggo]

When I was working on the NHS systems I can confirm they did indeed use CSV and XLS(X) to import and export data in some of their programs. It gets worse though:

One of the systems is based around drug acquisition, every hospital in the uk has THEIR OWN SPREADSHEET FORMAT which they use to request drugs, which gets uploaded and compared against a massive, HARD CODED switch case to determine BASED ON THE FILE NAME which rows and columns to read what data from. All of this was in Visual Basic...

If any of these excel formats change, for ANY of the hospitals, the import will fail and a manual HARD CODE CHANGE needs to be done to account for it. I worked on "upgrading" this system to use a newer version of excel and constantly ran into issues with date/time being converted to american format (MM/DD/YYYY instead of DD/MM/YYYY), with no proper debugger and barely any usable test data.

Software development is a freakin mess sometimes.

[darren]

The irony being, that if they *didn't* have to convert them to excel at some point in their pipeline, the CSV files would have been just fine 🤦‍♂️

[JimtheEvo]

“Spreadsheets don’t go on for ever” you can see the sadness in his eyes when he says it.

[ChocoHearts]

Re: Autocorrect
I live on a street names June Drive. We had an issue where we weren't getting bills from a particular company. Short story long, my dad called them and figured out that whatever software they stored data in autocorrected "June #" to "06-#". Makes sense, right?

[DasGanon]

This is so good, I'm waiting for the inevitable SQL

[seanch]

"That is breath-taking incompetence" - this is pretty much par for the course for this government, Matt