Insight. Applied.
By editor
An audit report has blamed a spreadsheet "copy and paste" error for cost overruns and delays at an Edinburgh children’s hospital.
A local politician called it
[…] one of the most expensive typos in history.
How many more high-profile spreadsheet failures is it going to take before we deem the inappropriate use of them to be professional malpractice?
By editor
When the lead story in the Daily Mail complains about Excel misuse in its headline you know things have gone too far.
15,841 coronavirus cases were excluded from UK government figures as a result of
…an Excel spreadsheet reaching its maximum file size, which stopped new names being added in an automated process.
Apparently these details were not supplied to the "track and trace" programme, meaning that people exposed to the virus were not alerted—potentially leading to unnecessary infections.
I’ve been complaining about spreadsheet misuse for a decade, and this is one of the most shambolic examples I’ve come across. Blatant abuse of Excel as a ramshackle database.
This also highlights the dangers of casual automation. Without appropriate checks and balances, automated processes can fail catastrophically, and silently.
There really is no excuse for this level of incompetency. And, the worst thing is the "solution".
The technical issue has now been resolved by splitting the Excel files into batches.
Add more sticking plaster to the homespun system and press on. I can only weep.
Some additional technical details have been revealed since the story broke.
By editor
As companies start to take data more seriously we are seeing more of them publishing data design guidelines. Three comprehensive examples are
Consider adopting one of these if your organisation is just starting to get into data visualisation—or if your existing charts aren’t up to scratch.
By editor
Pandas is a Python package for working with tabular data—as in a spreadsheet or database table. It provides similar functionality to R’s data frames.
As pandas is rich in features it can be difficult to remember all its operations and syntax, so Enthought have produced a visual guide to the package in 8 handy pages.
By editor
Andy Kirk at Visualising Data ran a Twitter poll about the relative accessibility of R and Python to non-developers.
59% said that R was more accessible.
Obviously, the poll is far from scientific, but the comments he received reflect my own experiences of teaching both languages—such as the significance of the RStudio IDE and the tidyverse packages in getting people off the ground.