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For millions of people, from accountants to job rotation managers, Microsoft Excel has been a blessing.
But as spreadsheet software celebrates its 40th birthday, think about those who misplaced a decimal, skipped a row, or made a cut-and-paste mistake. Here are some of the most memorable examples.
austerity mistake
In 2010, two respected economists published an article influentially defending the years of austerity that followed. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argued in Growth in a Time of Debt that once a government’s debt reaches 90% of gross domestic product – a measure of a country’s economic output – growth reverses.
However, in 2013 it emerged that Harvard economists had made a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet: instead of falling 0.1%, their work should have found that the economies in question grew by 2.2% .
“It is sobering that such a mistake has crept into one of our newspapers,” they said in a statement. However, they maintained their general conclusion – debt hampers growth – but critics seized on the error.
“This cannot be good for the Austerity Team,” wrote American economist Paul Krugman.
Total dis-mae
Fannie Mae, the American mortgage lender, issued a quarterly earnings report in 2003 that contained accounting errors amounting to more than $1 billion. Fannie Mae said the errors were due to a company accountant putting the wrong formula in an Excel spreadsheet, as the financial firm sought to comply with a new accounting standard.
The company noted that the errors did not affect profits, but questions were raised about Fannie Mae’s internal controls at the time. Five years later, Fannie Mae was bailed out by the US government when the credit crisis took hold.
The computer says 000
MI5, the UK’s national spy agency, intercepted 134 incorrect phone numbers in 2010 after a spreadsheet error altered the last three digits of the numbers to “000”.
a report accepted The errors were caused by “a formatting error in an electronic spreadsheet,” adding euphemistically that “some degree of unintended collateral intrusion occurred.”
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Virus problems
During the coronavirus pandemic, almost 16,000 cases went unreported in England after an Excel error. The Guardian reported that the error may have been caused by a file containing test results, sent from NHS test and trace to Public Health England, exceeding the number of rows it could contain. As a result, testing reports went unfulfilled and contact tracers missed thousands of potentially infectious people.
Then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the incident “should never have happened”.
Whale-sized mistake
An internal report into a $6 billion trading loss at US investment bank JP Morgan, at the hands of a trader known as London Whale, found flaws in the way an important measure of financial risk in the company was being calculated. institution.
One problem was that the risk model that monitored the fateful portfolio operated “through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, through a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another,” a process that might sound to some. Excel Veterans.
According to the report, a bug was created after a cell was mistakenly divided by the sum of two interest rates, instead of the average.
James Kwak, a American academicHe said the report highlights one of Excel’s main problems: its accessibility.
“The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets… badly.” he wrote.