[Bradford] Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost

[John Robert Hudson]

HI Brian

And if they had used Gnumeric, they could have had 16,777,216 rows - but 
Gnumeric isn’t available on Windows because of lack of gtk support.

I don’t think the decision is anything to do with the Government which in 
theory supports open data standards but with the practices of the private 
companies working for the Government.

John

On Tuesday, 6 October 2020 09:42:57 BST you wrote:
>  I sent this to someone yesterday:The Test & Trace debacle was due to old
> version of Microsoft software only supported 65,000 rows. Had they been
> using Libre Office it would have been  1,048,576. so why are the Government
> still insisting on using Microsoft?! I think that sums up my thoughts on
> the matter. It would have been difficult to ignore calls by the update
> system on Linux not to update software whereas, with Microsoft, it is a
> case of buy an update to Office. Brian
> 
>     On Monday, 5 October 2020, 23:18:03 CEST, John Robert Hudson via
> Bradford <bradford at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>  Interesting that someone has just been saying the the US Food and Drug
> Agency requires anyone using Excel to carry out specific tests to ensure
> that it can handle the task it is being expected to handle.
> 
> John
> 
> On Monday, 5 October 2020 21:14:12 BST Darren Drapkin via Bradford wrote:
> > Something that bbci's front page turned up, this evening. It is
> > about how crap excel is, especially how crap it is when you give it
> > files in the wrong format.
> > 
> > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988[1]
> > 
> > --
> > Yours &c.
> > Darren Drapkin
> > 
> > --------
> > [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
> 
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