The news led James Kwak, a professor of law at the University of Connecticut, to warn that Excel is “incredibly fragile”. In 2013, an Excel error at JPMorgan masked the loss of almost $6bn (£4.6bn), after a cell mistakenly divided by the sum of two interest rates, rather than the average. Microsoft’s spreadsheet software is one of the world’s most popular business tools, but it is regularly implicated in errors which can be costly, or even dangerous, because of the ease with which it can be used in situations it was not designed for. 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. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. That report was then loaded into Microsoft Excel, and the new tests at the bottom were added to the main database.īut while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be 1,048,576 rows long – or, in older versions which PHE may have still been using, a mere 65,536. In this case, the Guardian understands, 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.
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