Research has found that up to 90 percent of all spreadsheets have errors that affect their results. I’ve written about the Harvard professors whose basic Excel mistakes led to untold misery for millions of people.

If you search for spreadsheet errors, you’ll get lots of stories, other than the Harvard fiasco.

• Hiding cells — instead of deleting them — cost Barclay’s bank millions during the 2008 meltdown.


• A cut and paste error cost TransAlta $24 million.


• Another cut and paste error cost JP Morgan $6 billion when a Value at Risk model was miscalculated.

There are many more, but you get the picture. Errors are so common that there’s a 15-year-old spreadsheet risks interest group.

zdnet.com

A pet peeve of mine is people hiding columns/rows with no documentation in spreadsheets. Drives me fucking nuts.

And if I have this conversation against at work:
Other person: “Don’t delete the spreadsheet, just copy and paste the new data in, you don’t want to mess up the links!”
Me: “The new data is irregular in both columns and rows, I’m going to have to relink everything anyway. At least deleting the sheet wholesale will generate REF errors that I can search for!”