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Truncated Rows

Another sad misadventure by way of Excel. For anyone in IT, this is absolutely mind-blogging - there is no excuse of such mishap given the variety of options available to do the job many of them free and open-source

"..one lab had sent its daily test report to PHE in the form of a CSV file – the simplest possible database format, just a list of values separated by commas. That report was then loaded into Microsoft Excel, and the new tests at the bottom were added to the main database.

But while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be 1,048,576 rows long. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. That means that, once the lab had performed more than a million tests, it was only a matter of time before its reports failed to be read by PHE"

We talk to clients about modernizing their IT infrastructure all the time. There is some top down push to make that happen though people with the pocket-books don't always understand what such modernization entails. Deep in the trenches of the organization, there are often hold-outs like these folks who decided to use Excel as their database to work with data from millions of covid tests. Good luck trying to modernize their way of doing their jobs. 

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