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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 kelnos on Monday October 05, 2020 @09:04PM (#24693822)
Sure, and I think at least the headline ("ill-thought-out use of Excel") avoids blaming MS or Excel itself.

Ultimately tools are built for particular things, and if you choose to use a tool for something it's not built for, and it breaks catastrophically, that's on you.

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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by sriram_malhar on Monday October 05, 2020 @10:52PM (#24694325)
No. Excel is definitely to blame. A simple error "cannot import/export more than 65k rows" would have done the trick. Not silently throw away rows.
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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by corty on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @02:40AM (#24695261)
The premise of excel is very much "don't bug me, just do it". The highly praised UI simplifies away corner cases and errors intentionally. Summing over an empty cell? Most probably zero, why throw an error and confuse the user? The simplified UI makes correctness hard to impossible, so excel is just unsuitable for tasks where correctness is desired.
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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by account42 on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:49AM (#24695856)
Interpreting an empty cell as 0 is making an (often correct) assumption about what the user wanted.

Throwing away data without warning is almost certainly never what the user wanted.

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