An friend of mine told me a story about excel abuse in her company. She's in HR, and it was annual review time. They were passing around a spreadsheet with 'employee name' and 'raise %'. Each manager was supposed to enter the raise for their employees.

So, a few days later, the spreadsheet came back, and the HR director was ready to process all these raises into payroll. My friend took a look at the sheet, and nothing made sense. Low performers were getting high raises, and vice versa.

After some investigation it turned out that some of the managers had sorted the spreadsheet so that they could find their employees better. But someone had screwed up, and only selected the name column. So, everything got messed up.

What was amazing that even after this was pointed out, the HR director was still pushing for the raises to go through as-is, because it would take too much time to do everything again.