(untitled)
Fail, fail, fail, good job it wasn’t corporate mission critical data. Oh Lord* please protect me from end user computing. Business users *LOVE* excel (and ms-access) as it puts computing power on the users desk;
why have one centrally managed application and database when you hundreds of spreadsheets and access databases all over the place. Much better for empire building.
Why have internal chargeback for IT development when you can let every luser think he/she can work as a developer and database administrator. Much easier to work if you don’t have share/justify your budget with anyone else! It’s much easier to waste 20K of budget for the day to day running of your operation rather than explain why you want to spend 10K in the IT department, after all that would mean making a decision.
It is impossible to create an fool proof application as the fools are so dammed inventive.
I can imagine what happened, whoever created the spreadsheet tried to replicate the cell with the date in it by dragging it down the column but excel kept incrementing the date by adding one day to the date. Of course by sticking a space on the end excel now sees it as text and does not increment the date when replicating the cell. <sarcasm> Wow, I’ve never seen a user do that before </sarcasm>.
And what sort of IT idiot would accept an excel/csv file as "correctly formatted data"
That is why now when the users want to upload anything to the servers, I give them a spreadsheet that is programmed to validate their input, create an upload file and kick off the FTP, and most importantly, the spreadsheet is protected to stop them fiddling with the code.
From Stan Kelly-Bootle's wonderful "Computer Contradictionary": -
downtime: the period during which the system is stable and safe from user input.
lusers can start the down voting now......
annon, for obvious reasons
-----------
* Imaginary friend of your own choice.