About once every 10 minutes every couple of weeks I warn someone about what a terrible fucking idea storing important data in Excel really is. Seriously, don’t do dumb things like that. There are are as many good alternatives to Excel as there are pieces of software that are not named Excel. I’d sooner try to recover lost data from scraps of paper kept in a hat than I would some monstrous spreadsheet filled with fuckery that sorta works most of the time. Try a fucking database that is actually designed to efficiently store, manage, and retrieve data. Seriously.
That makes disasters like the loss of 16K Covid-19 tests in England so painful. If you’d used not even the right tool but any tool actually designed for the task at hand. I know people are lazy and stupid but you can be lazier and stupider with better tools and not, you know, have to change the naming convention for genes:
Errors from the spreadsheet software have even changed the very foundations of human genetics. The names of 27 genes have been changed over the past year by the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee, after Microsoft’s program continually misformatted them. The genes SEPT1 and MARCH1, for instance, have been changed to SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1 after they were repeatedly turned into dates, while symbols that were common words have been altered so that grammar tools didn’t autocorrect them: WARS is now WARS1, for instance.
There are very good reasons why your IT folks get so pissed at you after you build some business critical business process that runs entirely in Excel and is brittle and prone to losing or altering the data it mismanages. Don’t do it.