While I am not in the habit of defending Microsoft, I think it should be pointed out that it wasn't using "Excel" that was the biggest problem, but using "13-years obsolete format for Excel". Not that there was any reason to be using Excel for this, but it's a bit unfair to blame Microsoft for something they never claimed XLS could do, and provided a much better capacity in XLSX 13 years ago.
Again, it's hard to cry too many tears for Microsoft, but it does seem a bit off-target to blame "Excel" for this...
The issue with is excel is that its failure mode is suboptimal. Programming languages will generally crash at runtime when an unrecoverable
error occurs (index out of bounds, memory allocation failed, null pointer, etc). But excel just throws away your data?
Indeed, you have to manually inspect results to verify correctness. If you're lucky maybe your error will result in one of those weird error values being shown instead, but way too often that is not the case
Not to mention that complex formulae are still usually expressed as a bunch of gobbledygook in the cell value textbox, which is about as easy to parse as minified Javascript. And that's to technical users like ourselves.
Excel tops out a little more over a million rows without specifically handling of larger files. I’m not sure excusing it, just a heads up to all the junior analysts out there who haven’t dealt with the problem(not implying you’re a junior analyst, just wanted to point something out to those who aren’t familiar with the issue).
> Programming languages will generally crash at runtime when an unrecoverable error occurs (index out of bounds, memory allocation failed, null pointer, etc).
Sure, and I think at least the headline ("ill-thought-out use of Excel") avoids blaming MS or Excel itself.
Ultimately tools are built for particular things, and if you choose to use a tool for something it's not built for, and it breaks catastrophically, that's on you.
The premise of excel is very much "don't bug me, just do it". The highly praised UI simplifies away corner cases and errors intentionally. Summing over an empty cell? Most probably zero, why throw an error and confuse the user? The simplified UI makes correctness hard to impossible, so excel is just unsuitable for tasks where correctness is desired.
knowing a little how things (don't) work in the UK, it's likely subcontracted, but to a company belonging to a mate of the director in charge of the whole thing
Over-13-years old Excel already opened delimited flat files natively, and it threw warnings when you opened a .csv file that exceeded the worksheet row limit. Someone in the distant past was just clever enough to hack together the script (with no error handling) without being curious enough to know it wasn't necessary in the first place.
Again, it's hard to cry too many tears for Microsoft, but it does seem a bit off-target to blame "Excel" for this...