@AthanSpod I’ve found quite a lot of Excel people are a bit myth-and-superstition. Someone probably got told that it was best for the widest compatibility back in 2008 and has been doing it that way ever since…
@AthanSpod Sounds about normal. Must be quite an elderly version of Excel, though; it’s been a while since I ran into that one.
(Or, you know, whoever. There’s plenty of really good non-engineer Excel experts out there who may well have never bumped into its more extreme limits, but unprecedented times often have unprecedented numbers of rows and columns…)
I imagine whatever the details of this cock-up are, though, it’ll mostly be because people are stitching things together hurriedly and reactively and the time and circumstances to do a medical-grade job simply aren’t available, so I feel for the engineers.
…a user typed “2| Acacia Avenue” instead of “21 Acacia Avenue”, or someone pasted some perfectly valid Unicode characters into a name field but the CSV file three processes along could only deal with 7-bit ASCII so it fell on its arse as soon as Mr Müller showed up.
I mean, mostly I’ve just been grateful on those happy occasions when the process I have to deal with has already been through the apparently inevitable stages of being fixed after it broke down as soon as someone put in the name “O’Connor”, or…
As someone who’s spent a lifetime working for major financial institutions, it surprises me not one iota that something got screwed up by some form of CSV/Excel mangling.
Re-discovering three-cornered notes collation.folger.edu/2020/09/three-…
Hands up anyone else old enough to say, “ooh, is that a Lear Siegler?” twitter.com/rotherhambugle…