Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
The badly thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software was the reason nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England. And it appears that Public Health England (PHE) was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor. The issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by commercial firms paid to analyse swab tests of the public, to discover who has the virus. They filed their results in the form of text-based lists - known as CSV files - without issue. PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team, as well as other government computer dashboards. The problem is that PHE's own developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS. As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of. ... --- Original Unix had many arbitrary limitations and often they were not apparent. One of the important goals professed by the GNU project was to eliminate such limitations. Outside GNU, many applications have arbitrary limitations and users are often not aware of them. In addition users may decide to impose limitations. Often this is done for security reasons. In many workplaces the manager in charge of PC security and digital communications does this, and he or she may or may not clearly express what restrictions are in place. Even when they are made clear some workers will fail to pay attention to the fine rules. The following incident, which I experienced recently illuminates the situation. Recently I needed to send some photos to city hall. I sent Email with a tar file containing 12 jpeg images as an attachment but it bounced. So I asked the person in charge why this happened. She said that they had a limit in their mail server. I asked what was the maximum message size allowed and she answered: "Five giga (bytes)." I said "Now five gigabytes is very large. Are you sure?" To this she replied: "I heard that it was five something and I can only recall the number five." This came from a city official known to be highly competent and well respected by co-workers. Assuming that the actual limit was five megabytes, I re-sized the images so that the entire Email would smaller than that, and sent it out. This time the mail did not bounce. But later, the civil servant told our organization the photos never arrived. So one of my colleagues printed the images on paper and visited city hall in person to settle the matter.
