
A plague on Excel's house!
Excel has been both a blessing and a curse throughout my working life. A blessing because it's given me plenty of work fixing cock-ups caused by its being (ab)used for data entry and preparation, and a curse because I've had to set about fixing the cock-ups in the first place. Lowlights along the way include Excel outputs breaking batch loads thanks to its 'smart quotes' feature, a major row at a Very Big Bank because the 'test data validation team' were oblivious to the Software from Hell's propensities for arbitrarily reformatting dates, another series of little oopsies caused by the silent conversion of large integers into exponentials and data quality reports going haywire because saved CSV files had loads of empty trailing rows.
If Serco really are using Excel as a main data store, they deserve to be hung out to dry and permanently barred from getting any future government work, considering the money that Spaffer's spaffed on them. That's absolutely unforgivable.
See icon for what I'd like to do to Excel.