We Are All Programmers Now

Every once in a while you hear about an accident someone has using a spreadsheet. One of the more recent and frightening ones involved the British NHS Covid-19 tracking spreadsheet that lost a lot of data. But other (hopefully less serious) stories regularly involve the corruption of data like messing up pasted-in Greek letters or mis-interpreting some numbers for calendar dates. 

These accidents are kind of like autocorrect (which should perhaps be renamed “overcorrect”), but instead of automatically changing the spelling of a word, it changes the numbers and other data you might type or paste into a cell. And you might not notice.

Microsoft Word and other word processors are expecting you to input text. Whether it’s a love letter or a resume or a grocery list, it assumes you’re typing words into it. You might also paste a picture or two, but it’s still only trying to figure out where to display it in relation to the text. It doesn’t claim to know anything much about the words you enter except how to spell them and some pedantic grammar rules. Excel, on the other hand, isn’t a tool for merely displaying and printing out nice, neat tables: that’s just a by-product. The real job of a spreadsheet is to do math, and we don’t realize that whenever we type numbers or words or other symbols into Excel, it’s fully expecting to do mathematical things to them. Whether you know it or not, you’re programming a computer. Excel gives you the settings and tools to specify exactly what kind of numbers you’re typing in (e.g. money, percentages or text) but most of us go with the default setting.

So using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets to make a quick table of words and numbers that you just want to read might be a bit like using a blender for a flower vase: it will hold whatever you put in it even though it might look a little awkward. And it might do something unexpected and violent to its contents if you’re not careful.