Spreadsheets Everywhere
In October last year (long before the vaccines came along), there was an amusing-if-it-weren’t-so-serious incident where the UK’s COVID contact tracing system “lost” 16,000 cases. The risk this created was high, writes Tim Harford: “These were 16,000 people who should have been warned they were infected and a danger to others, 16,000 cases contact tracers should have been running down to figure out where the infected went, who they met and who else might be at risk. None of which was happening.” How had that happened? Because of a limitation in MS Excel: the older “xls” format supported only 64,000 rows. Enter any more and they wouldn’t get saved: “This meant that during some automated process, cases had vanished off the bottom of the spreadsheet, and nobody had noticed.” Digital spreadsheets have replaced the original paper spreadsheet, those “big sheets of paper spread across two pages of an accounting ledger”. It started with VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3 unt...