UK world leading track & trace using excel

[MartinRouterKing]

Surely this has to be a joke?

 

£35M for a spreadsheet?

 

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/shock-and-despair-follow-revelations-that-world-beating-test-and-trace-system-is-being-run-on-excel/05/10/

[DrBeaker]

Surely this has to be a joke?

 

£35M for a spreadsheet?

 

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/shock-and-despair-follow-revelations-that-world-beating-test-and-trace-system-is-being-run-on-excel/05/10/

I'll do it for £30m. [emoji12]

[aicrd]

So would £60M get us an Access database?

[Norphy]

For that, I’ll do it in FoxPro. Maybe with a FileMaker frontend, just for the lols

[mikeprice]

It looks like the actual system runs on something more reasonable

 

They seem to have exported it for sending to the tracing and for publishing stats and at some point round there it was put into a spreadsheet - using an XLS file not XLSX

 

which is where the problem lies

 

i.e. a system that may - or may not - work perfectly well

 

with an export and send system that was thought out by 'Fred - who knows about computers'

 

basically a transfer system that uses designs that should have gone out of the door in the 1980s when proper networks started - implemented by someone who thinks they know what they are doing

[aicrd]

Wouldn't surprise me if the actual system was done in something like Visual Studio LightSwitch using some ancient Excel export API to take data from a database and put it on the system.

[mikeprice]

Wouldn't surprise me if the actual system was done in something like Visual Studio LightSwitch using some ancient Excel export API to take data from a database and put it on the system.

 

TBH I wouldn't be surprised if it was done in QB45

 

or - worse still Basic on Level6 MOD400 (you had to be there - just be glad you were not)

 

 

although that may not be fair

sounds like a system that was designed to comply with a timescale - rather than a system that was designed based on requirements and the time scale based on that

 

 

Almost like there was no other alternative