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

[John Robert Hudson]

HI all

I was wrong about it being the private companies; they were asked to supply 
their data in CSV format; someone at Public Health England then imported the 
data into Excel xls files!

John

On Tuesday, 6 October 2020 10:49:59 BST John Robert Hudson wrote:
> 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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