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Re:Technical error with Excel.swapped names.Andreas Babler e... by _dain_ on Monday June 05, 2023 @02:13PM (#36200539)
I used to work for a UK government ministry that has a budget in the tens of billions of pounds per year. I can tell you with confidence: no, there really is no linting, typing, automated testing, version control, nor any other tooling that you would consider "table stakes" for software development, when it comes to spreadsheets. Every single policy mechanism of that ministry relies, at some point in the pipeline, on at least one untested spreadsheet full of copypasted formulae, and inscrutable VBA macros passed down through generations. There are quality control reviews, of course, but they're manual. They don't scale. And these spreadsheets are used to make decisions that decide the fates of nearly 70 million people. And that ministry is not exceptional wrt other ministries, i.e. they're all as bad as this.

There were low ranking people who recognized how stupid this all was, and pointed it out. But hardly anyone with decisionmaking power even understood the problem. So nothing changed. It was the dark ages, and a major factor in why I quit.

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