https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1313046638915706880
> The reason was apparently that the database is managed in Excel and the number of columns had reached the maximum.
> The reason was apparently that the database is managed in Excel and the number of columns had reached the maximum.
You're meant to add additional records as rows! (Excel supports only 16,384 columns, but 1,048,576 rows.)
Actually, this was a pet peeve of mine: Especially in the early days of COVID, just about every official or unofficial data source was an absolute shitshow:
- Transposed data (new entries in columns)
- Pretty printed dates (instead of ISO 8601 or Excel format, or... anything even vaguely parseable by computer).
- US date formats mixed in with non-US date formats.
- Each day in a separate file, often with as little as 100 bytes per file. Thousands upon thousands of files.
- Random comments or annotations in numeric fields (preventing graphing the data).
We don't all need to be data scientists, or machine learning wizards, or quantum computing gods.
But come on. This is the most basic, data entry clerk level Excel 101 stuff. Trivial, basic stuff.
Put rows in rows.
Don't mix random notes into columns you might want to sum or graph.
Don't mix units.
Have headers.
Use a sane date format.
That is all.
</rant>
Or else it wouldn't explain why it took so many days to realize that they couldn't add more columns.
And then the same people wondered why things based on this file didn't work.
ie a csv is equivalent to Excel at the Daily Mail, so they printed Excel as the issue due to it being more familiar to their readership.
(Can't think of what the technical issue would be in the case of a csv, also doubt the credibility of the source!)