I saw this shared around and thought it was some sort of sick joke
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Fadgebadger Sweaty sumo wanks for everyone!, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 18:35,
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^ This
Shirley it's some sort of wind up? If not I cannot take much more of this utter shit
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spazzcaptain Misses Valin @, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 20:53,
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No, it's very plausible.
Third parties use CSV, because it will work everywhere, but when you import it into Excel it will drop everything after the 216th or 220th row depending on the version (65,536 and 1,048,576).
I don't have Excel on the mac so I'm not sure if it warns you if this is going to happen. Even if it does I wouldn't be surprised either; something like 90% of people just reflexively click "Yes" without reading warnings.
To make matters worse, Excel has extremely limited access controls: read all, read/write all, no access. Hardly in the spirit of the GDPR, though there are quite broad exemptions for governments in there.
Excel is great for its intended purpose.
The problem is that storing very large datasets is not it.
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jonbob loves you, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 23:08,
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It gets worse
Half of Gov use google docs, which surprisingly doesn't play well with the MS stuff the other half use.
(, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 0:43, Reply)
Don't forget Excel likes to fuck up the encoding and add a BOM
Also don't forget using Excel as a database in 2020 is just a fucking terrible idea, even more so if you're not even fucking using it right. Any common database can export and import csv. Excel is not the tool for this purpose, especially not for 12 billion fucking quid
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Fadgebadger Sweaty sumo wanks for everyone!, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 7:04,
Reply)