Over the recent days, information leaked out how the UK authorities cope with their reported Corona figures. Due to a “technical problem”, about 16,000 Infected including 50,000 contact persons have somehow “got lost”1. Well actually, they are using a bunch of Microsoft Excel files. Unfortunately, a spreadsheet stops working at 1,048,576 lines.
Yesterday evening I listened to “The Bunker” podcast2 with the beautiful title “Orange Hawk Down - plus Dirty Data Returns” and was given the best quote so far:
The idea of using Excel for that kind of data crunching is like trying to make Toy Story 5 using Powerpoint.
Thank you Alex Andreou3 for this best quote so far.