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A comment on Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel. Parent comment

Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by jen729w on Monday October 05, 2020 @04:28PM (#24691652)
Even just within my own sheet I always build in some sort of idiot-check, the assumption being that I’m the idiot.

Do a SUM and match it against a COUNTIF on another column, or something. It doesn’t really matter what it is but if the data is important at all, I always scatter little checks throughout.

The case described in this article sounds like someone who just doesn’t know how to use Excel. I mean why in the name of VLOOKUP would you override the default and choose to save as .xls? That was a conscious decision. Anyone worth their salt knows that’s stupid.

Excel is not to blame here.

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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by dkarp on Monday October 05, 2020 @05:49PM (#24692427)
I’d guess they wrote a script to merge the csv file and export in xls. Xls might have been the default of the library they used in a rush. I think this may be the case with some python libraries that generate excel files as xlsx is a more complicated format.
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