I don't know why people are blaming Excel.

The problem is that these researchers, or even the economists in the paper on Global Austerity, aren't properly trained in what is essentially a computer programming task, and they don't do things like validate their data. These are basically bugs in their spreadsheet that they didn't catch.

Sure, Excel may behave unexpectedly for their particular uses, but for the vast majority of finance people, it works very predictability. If they had spent time validating the data, they would have realized that the names had been modified, and they could have corrected for it.