the.com/excel hell
where a spreadsheet quietly becomes the load-bearing wall of your entire company.
means a fragile, undocumented, massively overgrown excel file that critical business decisions secretly depend on.
from coined by finance and ops people watching one analyst's quick weekend hack turn into the system nobody can touch without everything breaking; the term spread through corporate slang in the 2000s as spreadsheets metastasized past their intended scope.
london whalejpmorgan lost billions partly from a copy paste error
circular referenceone bad formula loop can crash entire models
one person knowsmost excel hells rely on a single irreplaceable employee
for instance
jpmorgan london whale — 2012 trading loss traced to a flawed excel risk model
reinhart rogoff error — 2010 economics paper's austerity argument undone by a coding mistake
covid test data loss — england 2020, 16000 cases vanished from an old xls file