TECH Signal 509
Engineer argues spreadsheets encourage poor organization and errors as they grow
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An engineer with a decade of reviewing Excel files from other firms lays out why his fundamental rule for spreadsheets is "Don't," citing opaque formulas, inconsistent formatting, and data split across sheets as recurring problems.
If you hand spreadsheets to downstream analysts, your formatting and formula choices directly affect their ability to verify your work. The article is a field report on how the convenience of click-and-drag spreadsheet construction produces files that are hard to audit, hard to automate against, and hard to trust.
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The author's fundamental rule is "Don't" use spreadsheets, shaped by reviewing dozens of Excel files from engineering firms over 10 to 15 years.
Recurring problems included complex nested formulas, inconsistent rows, far-away cell references, no named cells, data split across sheets, and multiline headers that blocked CSV export.
Every spreadsheet was sui generis with no house style, forcing manual data cleaning and repeated double-checking to avoid copy/paste mistakes.
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