Excel & the Missing Covid Cases

I've seen the articles about Excel being blamed for 15,841 lost Covid cases in England. Here's what I see:

A clickbait headline that's sure to rouse Excel lovers and Excel haters. Good practice for engagement.

However, the articles underneath the clickbait are more interesting. They point to a really old version of Excel being used to compile data from .csv files.

That leads me to more questions than conclusions and answers.

• Why was Excel being used?
• Why the old .xls version of Excel?
• Why not a database or dedicated software?

Having worked with Excel and data in lots of different situations, I can't wag my finger at someone else and say, "well, you should have _____ !" Sometimes there are good reasons why someone is doing something that makes no sense to outsiders.

 I did a project for a company that was stuck on an old version of Excel because it was compatible with a critical software they used, but not compatible with .xlsx versions. They hated the situation and were looking for a solution.

 I've seen dedicated softwares that weren't adopted because they were too damned complicated, and people went back to Excel.

Public Health England (PHE) was using a version of Excel that's at least 13 years old. Why? I don't know. One article says that the PHE "suggests" it was part of a legacy system that they'd recently planned to upgrade. Is that true? I don't know.

 This leaves me with some of my concerns about the future we're living into:

•  More and more clickbait.
• More and more finger-wagging from journalists and people who claim to have an Excel-killer for sale. It's great engagement. Clicks, shares, likes, and nasty comments FTW!
• Software is flimsy and we need to look at this because we're all vulnerable as we rush into the cloud and Internet-of-Things. We've got all these different versions of things; stuff gets hacked; websites crash; plugins and apps get abandoned; one company after another apologizes for security blunders; UX updates that users didn't expect, want or ask for.

This is the future: clickbait and an increasingly flimsy ecosystem of software.

As we stand back and gawk at PHE. Remember this:

There but for the grace of God go I.