alt Hacker NewsIt wouldn't surprise me one bit if many of these things can be attributed to Excel usage. I'm a "power user" of excel, and when working on larger problems with tens of sheets, smaller mistakes can easily carry on. Even more so if you're not a proficient user.
One of my first jobs as an analyst was to clean up messy spreadsheets made by people, even very senior employees, who never bothered to learn excel properly.
Replies
jcattle • today at 8:22 AM
Yes, immediately thought the same. CSV alone is a footgun and a half on any computer which doesn't have . as the decimal separator.
Let alone column sorting and joining of data.
➕ show 1 reply
I think that's a little unfair. It really comes down to parsing text and you'll have similar issues even if you use a database or whatever you think the "real" solution is. I have a project I'm working on right now that stores dates, phone numbers, and website links. Cleaning/parsing has been 90% of the work and I still have edge cases that aren't fully solved. Every time I think I'm done, I find something else I haven't thought about. Local AI models have been a huge help though for sanitizing.