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This is a link post Stay sharp, UK Gov.
I’ve worked for a few government departments in my time and every single one has had problems because they were too cheap to get a full license for MS Access. In recent years some of them have finally started to wake up, thank God; at the very least it’s starting to sink in that shared workbooks are generally a recipe for ballache of the third order.

By the by, if you applied to the social fund in the years before it wound down, there’s a decent chance one of my VB cludges was involved.

ed: props to whoever did the automatic preview image feature.
How Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England


 (I helped save b3ta! jonbob loves you, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 15:52, Reply)
This is a normal post Calamity Dido strikes again.

(I helped save b3ta! wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 16:23, Reply)
This is a normal post Is that your nickname for Kayleigh McEnany?

(I helped save b3ta! jonbob loves you, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 16:40, Reply)
This is a normal post She'll be the next Pope at this rate.

(I helped save b3ta! fred zeppelin II: Electric Boogaloo, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 18:35, Reply)
This is a normal post I saw this shared around and thought it was some sort of sick joke

(I helped save b3ta! Fadgebadger Sweaty sumo wanks for everyone!, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 18:35, Reply)
This is a normal post ^ This
Shirley it's some sort of wind up? If not I cannot take much more of this utter shit
 (I helped save b3ta! spazzcaptain Misses Valin @, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 20:53, Reply)
This is a normal post 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.
 (I helped save b3ta! jonbob loves you, Mon 5 Oct 2020, 23:08, Reply)
This is a normal post It gets worse
Half of Gov use google docs, which surprisingly doesn't play well with the MS stuff the other half use.
 (Myarse looks big in this, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 0:43, Reply)
This is a normal post matt hancock has an app for that

(I helped save b3ta! artifus is doing it all wrong, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 4:40, Reply)
This is a normal post 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
 (I helped save b3ta! Fadgebadger Sweaty sumo wanks for everyone!, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 7:04, Reply)
This is a normal post
I still believe that if the answer is Microsoft Access, you're asking the wrong question.
 (I helped save b3ta! evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 9:37, Reply)
This is a normal post Maybe
But the thought of them using a homegrown SQL front end is too hideous to contemplate.
 (I helped save b3ta! jonbob loves you, Tue 6 Oct 2020, 19:46, Reply)