SpreadsheetMistakes

Public reports of spreadsheet errors collated by the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EuSpRIG).

Our annual conference in Cambridge, UK, 5-7 July 2006 will be on "Managing Spreadsheets: Improving corporate performance, compliance and governance."

http://www.eusprig.org/stories.htm

And spreadsheets were supposed to eliminate programming, so that every non-professional could do their own spreadsheet type work. Somehow, someone manages to professionalize every new thing that comes out, and make a living at it. More power to them. - JerryWeinberg 2006.06.10

It turns out that what we're willing to settle for out of any given technology has more to do with how hard it is than with the need side of the balance. We're perfectly happy getting from computers only what we can get pre-spreadsheet. Then, with spreadsheets in hand allowing lots of people to do what even the elect could not before, we invent or discover new needs up to the limits of what the genius class can produce with the new, bigger hammers.
The big brains are still creating their unique better offer and we mere mortals ahhhh and ohhhh over these new, new things. More power to the buyers as well as the sellers. - JimBullock 2006.06.11

has come out with a web-based spreadsheet. It eases the task of collaborative data collection, reducing the need to manually merge a set of contributions (but not eliminating the need for careful editing).

The very first one of these that I was asked to contribute to had an error in a formula. Each section had a subtotal, and the overall total included both the subtotals and the numbers that went into them. Fortunately, I was the first person to enter data. When my "5" became a total of "10", a little light bulb went on.

--DaveSmith 2006.07.04

Isn't that mostly a problem of visibility? You see the numbers, but you don't see how they are connected. It's extremely difficult to grasp the model behind the displayed data.

There are some spreadsheet products who treat views, data and models/formulas separately; But I don't think that these will be used widely in the future. The switching costs are just to high.

--MarkusSchnell 2006-07-05

Updated: Wednesday, July 5, 2006