Robert spent time on the phone today with people at one of the companies who have to report information to his organization, explaining the myriad errors they made in their spreadsheet.
The most idiotic one involved summing row 49 - 55 when they should have summed row 50 - 55. This meant that they were adding the date, stored in row 49, to the dollar data below it. Since the dollar data only added up to $21,000, and Excel stored the date as 40,000-something (the number of days since Jan 1, 1900 or whatever), the sum was clearly, utterly wrong. Robert reports that they "capitulated on that one almost immediately."
Unlike some other times Robert has found screwy stuff with companies' spreadsheets, this does not appear to be a "mistake" that they made on purpose.
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2 comments:
I also sometimes see spreadsheets where the sum has come up short a row at either top or bottom - which generally leaves the company asking for a few dollars less than they intended. These spreadsheets are often hundreds or thousands of rows on a dozen or more tabs - it is a wonder I don't find more errors.
I make a fair amount of these types of errors myself.
Excel should probably give you a warning if your formula is adding a date with some other numbers.
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