# Microsoft's Excel Might Be The Most Dangerous Software On The Planet



## holymoly (Jun 21, 2003)

According to Forbes;

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors...he-planet/?goback=.gde_70192_member_214103407


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## jiml8 (Jul 3, 2005)

I just have to comment on this. One of my clients is one of those banks.

A couple of years ago, I got a contract with them and they gave me an Excel spreadsheet - a large and complicated financial model. My task was to evaluate it, then tell them how best to improve it.

This model ran to about 100 worksheet tabs, in a few cases with thousands of rows and hundreds of columns, filled the entire 3+ Gigs of a 32 bit Windows machine, and would run for as much as 16 hours when they ran some cases. There was also a LOT of hand-work in it.

It took me months to decipher, disassemble, document, and understand this model. And along the way, I did find a number of errors - a couple of them potentially very significant. I also found lots of opportunities to introduce errors in the hand-work portions of the model.

The Federal Reserve depends in part on this model for their decision making.

I wound up generating a design and documentation for a wholly new system for this bank, based on SQL Server with a Java front end (Java was their choice, not mine). They are now building it in-house, and I expect further contracts to do quality assurance and validation work a bit later on.


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