Technology: February 2013 Archives

The Importance of Excel | The Baseline Scenario

Billions of dollars may be riding on the accuracy of formulas in an Excel spreadsheet or the accuracy of manual copy-and-paste from one sheet to another. "But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there's no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there's no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets--badly. Because it's so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way." Comments on the story contain more anecdotes on the hazards of Excel overreliance.