It's definitely a pain in the hole, that much we know

During that period there was full employment in the UK. There was no unemployment unless you chose to not work. The fact that they used Excel appears to be irrelevant when the data in was garbage.


This is the real answer, but many politicians do not care about that. They want to use it as a reason to shrink the state.

So, nothing to do with Excel and everything to do with nobody double checking their work, before they published!

It reminds me of the case against Lotus in the late 80s, where a company used 1-2-3 to produce quotes and the new quote was 3 lines longer than previous quotes and caused the engineers to under quote the work by $60,000 or so (ISTR), because they didn't extend the formula to cover the new lines, they assumed that 1-2-3 would magically recognise that 3 extra lines had data and adjust the formula itself.

Lotus won the case. Software is no magical remedy for idiocy.

It seems that some are more interested in blaming Microsoft than checking the facts. The fact that they produced the report on Excel is of minor significance. It could have just as easily been done with Numbers or Open Office. When I initially read the headline I thought that it was going to be similar to the floating point problem many years ago. I was drawn more to the fact that the selection of data was also highly selective.

Is that what Excel's for?

I've never seen it used for anything other than cutter guides for large poly bags.