For millions of people, from accountants to roster managers, Microsoft Excel has been a godsend.
But as this spreadsheet software celebrates its 40th anniversary, think about all the people who have misplaced the decimal point, omitted a row, or cut and pasted incorrectly. Here are some of the most memorable examples.
The fallacy of austerity
In 2010, two prominent economists published a paper that made an influential case for the years of austerity that followed. In Growth in the Age of Debt, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argued that growth reverses when government debt reaches 90% of gross domestic product (a measure of a country’s economic output).
But in 2013, it was revealed that a Harvard University economist had made an error in an Excel spreadsheet. Their study should have found that the economy in question would have grown by 2.2% instead of falling by 0.1%.
“It is humbling to see such an error sneak into one of our papers,” they said in a statement. Still, they supported the general conclusion that debt hinders growth, a fallacy that was pounced on by critics.
US economist Paul Krugman wrote: “This cannot be a good thing for the austerity team.”
Totally dismae
In 2003, US mortgage finance company Fannie Mae released a quarterly financial report containing accounting errors totaling more than $1 billion. Fannie Mae said the mistake was made by the company’s accountant. enter the wrong formula A financial company was looking to comply with new accounting standards, so they converted their data into an Excel spreadsheet.
Although the company emphasized that the mistake did not affect profits, questions were raised at the time about Fannie Mae’s internal controls. Five years later, as the credit crunch deepened, Fannie Mae was bailed out by the U.S. government.
the computer says “000”
MI5, Britain’s domestic spy agency, intercepted 134 incorrect phone numbers in 2010 after a spreadsheet error changed the last three digits of the numbers to “000”.
report admitted The error was due to a “formatting violation in an electronic spreadsheet,” it euphemistically added, “which resulted in some degree of unintended collateral intrusion.”
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virus problem
Nearly 16,000 cases went unreported in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic due to an Excel error. The Guardian reported that the mistake may have been caused by the file containing test results sent by the NHS Test and Trace to Public Health England containing more rows than it contained. . As a result, test reports were missed and thousands of potentially infected people were missed by contact tracers.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary at the time, said the incident “never should have happened”.
Whale size mistake
An internal report into US investment bank JPMorgan’s $6 billion trading losses at the hands of a trader known as the London Whale reveals flaws in how the institution calculated a key measure of its financial risk. did.
One problem is that the risk models that monitor portfolios of fortune operate through “a series of Excel spreadsheets that must be completed manually by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.” That’s what I was doing. This process may ring alarm bells for some. Excel veteran.
The error occurred because the cell was mistakenly divided by the sum of two interest rates instead of the average value, the report said.
James Kwak american scholarsaid the report outlined one of Excel’s major issues: accessibility.
“The biggest problem is that anyone can create an Excel spreadsheet. It’s terrible.” he wrote.
Source: www.theguardian.com
