A importância do Excel

Antes de mais nada, é bom deixar claro: 

Eu tenho gostos peculiares. Vocês não entenderiam.

E um desses prazeres secretos é colecionar histórias envolvendo cagadas homéricas causadas pelo Excel.

Já falei disso uns tempos atrás. O mais novo item da lista foi a do serviço de saúde pública da Inglaterra, que deixou de contabilizar os resultados de 16000 exames de COVID-19 porque estava copiando dados manualmente no Excel.

E esse link acima me levou a outro artigo, mais antigo, e de onde tirei título do post, aliás. 

Grifos meus.

But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.***

This is why the JPMorgan VaR model is the rule, not the exception: manual data entry, manual copy-and-paste, and formula errors. This is another important reason why you should pause whenever you hear that banks’ quantitative experts are smarter than Einstein, or that sophisticated risk management technology can protect banks from blowing up. At the end of the day, it’s all software. While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number.

Como diz um conhecido meu, problemas envolvendo computadores podem ter três causas-raiz possíveis: hardware, software ou people. E normalmente é people.