Reader reactions: Excel in the limelight

This week, instead of doing a strict list for our Week in Review, we’ve decided to highlight some of the reactions to the best and most important stories of the week. If this isn’t for you, fear not! Since Ars’ redesign last year, we’ve kept a “Top Stories” box on the front page (center column, scroll about halfway down), from which you can catch up on the most viewed stories of the week.

Spreadsheets ahoy

This week was full of awful stories in the news, but Ars is a tech publication, so we generally try to keep our coverage tech- and science-centric. Oddly enough, we had two, count ’em, two stories about Microsoft Excel hit the front page this week. The first was from Casey Johnston, who wrote “How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet.” The turn-based RPG is conducted entirely within an Excel file, and is called Arena.Xlsm. The accountant that created the game, Cary Walkin, did an AMA on reddit, describing the game and offering some snippets of code for the macros he uses so others can build on his idea.

By far the best comment on this story was from user sonolumi who spun us a high fantasy tale of bravery and daring:

Crawling around a Spreadsheet Dungeon to slay monsters? Sounds like my first job.

Stay a while and listen…

Twas an age ago when Graphical User Interfaces were but a pipe dream in the minds of ordinary MicroSerfs. The dungeon in question resided in the land of SuperCalc. It was a dull and sorrowful land rendered in monochromatic green phosphor.

Woe had befallen my Lord for he had to account for the addition of 3 new markets on the gargantuan monstrosity that was the Monthly Turnover report. Many a brave knight had attempted to tame the Beast, but it had been in vain. All challengers failed in their task, they had wildly hacked and slashed at it causing it grow bigger and more angry….”

We won’t quote the whole thing and spoil the end. Click the link on the troubadour’s alias to follow his journey to the end.

Our second story on Excel came from Peter Bright in “Microsoft Excel: The ruiner of global economies?” about an error introduced in a spreadsheet used to analyze data for a scholarly paper on economics. That paper was widely cited by politicians as a justification for introducing austerity measures, but once the error was fixed, the data suggested that the usefulness of austerity measures was not so clear-cut.

Of the story, commenter Shiimiish eloquently wrote:

“The spreadsheet error shown here is actually very easy to make in Excel… This particular error looks like that the average was made over the rows and then some lines have been inserted later on directly below the last row, in which case the formula will not auto-extend and the new numbers will be left out. This is something that happened to me before and something I do see in many spreadsheets I come across.

In any case my experience tells me that Excel is a single-user tool. As soon as a spreadsheet of a certain complexity shall be maintained by more than one person it will usually lead to disaster. As such, I usually will support a database solution whenever multiple user should work on a given data set.”

While Peter was writing the story, he wrote in our editorial IRC channel “Aurich: how quickly could you do a picture of an Excel logo somehow destroying the world?” To which our intrepid creative director Aurich Lawson wrote “lol, I could probably handle that.”

Lo and behold, not 30 minutes later, Ars Technica was the proud owner of this little beauty: