Spreadsheet mistakes have been directly attributed not only to thousands of deaths but billions of dollars of mistakenly wasted money. Heck, in the UK alone, they have attributed billions of pounds and thousands of deaths specifically to spreadsheet errors and flaws, and that's not even counting the COVID-related issues from the article. Check this scary article: https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-government-h...
There have been hordes of purpose-built apps that have aimed to replace the common spreadsheet for any number of tasks from inventory management to financial planning to even tracking nuclear weapons (true story: our nation's nuclear weapons stockpile is tracked in a spreadsheet). And yet, the spreadsheet is still here. The spreadsheet is the cockroach of all apps. At once utterly adaptable and seemingly indefeatable.
The spreadsheet is a horror show with lack of control, schema, and collaborative management. We surely can do better. But we haven't. Google and Microsoft have the best developers in the world who can do anything. And they have produced more spreadsheets. But spreadsheets are the bane of our existence! And yet they are still here.
The spreadsheet has survived from the mainframe era to the cloud-based era in pretty much the same form with enhancements. The spreadsheet is not going away, even with all the complaints in the article. The points are well made and well founded. But unfortunately they miss the point. 20 years from now we'll still be cursing the tyranny of the spreadsheets because of their utility.
I close with a Haiku:
| Rows and cells, alas |
| What makes your simple structure |
| So very useful? |
That's exactly what's being done. I work in mechanical engineering and Excel is the primary calculation tool all over the industry.
I bet excel has some excellent features around this, but they are not front and center in the UI.
Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
Like most of the software on the NeXT platform, it was ahead of its time.
yeah, it's called IF
Spreadsheets aren't 100% reliable for use cases where you need to collaborate and share immutable health records. Especially during a time of global emergency when tensions are heightened.
Spreadsheets don't impose validation, schema correctness, constraints, etc. and can amplify human errors. They can also inject errors of their own (eg. turning March1 the gene [1] into a date) when they're simply trying to be helpful.
How do multiple people manage a spreadsheet? How do you safely merge spreadsheets? How do you keep records from being duplicated or replaced? How do you do double bookkeeping? Can you atomically identify individual records?
This article is saying that we have to realize spreadsheets can be a source of scientific error simply because of their design intentions and ergonomics.
The closing remarks estimate that 1,500 people died as a result of spreadsheet error. That's remarkable.
[1] https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000145416-MARCH1