this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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It's a well known phenomenon. The title of the article even alludes to it.
What about the title?
Read the article. IMHO scientists were having problems because they were using it for a task it is ill suited for. The kind of program that is designed for storing large amounts of data and preventing accidental corruption of it is a database.
I think scientists would use Excel more for finding out information with their data, not for storing it. You know like looking for trends and plotting graphs and whatnot.
I think they use it for both. They end up using it as a database because they're familiar with it from doing data analysis. I've also heard of much more egregious examples, like a school using a giant Excel spreadsheet to track the applications of potential students. Need to track up to three references for each student? Make three of each column related to a reference! It's a really gross way of storing denormalized data without any of the ACID properties databases guarantee.