this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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You would be honestly very uncomfortable if you knew how much sensitive information is stored on the desktop of someone as an excel spreadsheet.
I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.
At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can't parse Excel 5.0.
There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.
You and I live similar lives in different places.
There are people in my office that print out their emails to read at their desk, right in front of their computer.
Collaborative document editing has been around for over a decade, and yet we’re still emailing each other different versions of docs.
Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.
I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.
Some number of years ago, I was an intern within a department of state government. I was tasked with helping to enrich their databases. So they sent over an Excel file. I did my thing and added new columns, then I had to send it back over to someone within each division so they could do the data entry. To my horror, when I went to visit one of the division heads, I saw their admin sitting at a computer with a printout of my changes sitting on a document holder next to the screen...manually typing geographic coordinates into a data entry form.
Pure hell
This sounds exactly like Hell in Good Omens
True, I work in ecomm and we definitely have database exports being passed around relatively freely. No passwords obviously, but segmentation data, emails, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
We have good IT security but it still doesn't feel great.