The title of this blog post is taken from the excellent book “Humble Pi (a comedy of maths errors)” by the fantastic Matt Parker a “standup mathematician” who brings comedy to the world of maths.
The book contains various chapters about how simple mistakes in maths have had catastrophic and sometimes hilarious effects, but the one that applies directly to PIM usage and pimsimple is the section on people using Microsoft Excel as a database.
He describes how most people put their data into Excel because it’s easy to use and before you know it, you’re reliant on it, but that’s how mistakes are made. For example a Phone Number isn’t a number, as Matt says “just because something walks like a number and quacks like a number does not mean it is a number… When have you ever added two phone numbers together? Or found the prime factors of a phone number?”
The problem with Excel is it will take what you type and guess what you mean. If you type in the phone number 0161 804 1850 for example, not only will the zero disappear but 1,618,041,850 is a really big number and Excel will switch to scientific notation and say the data is 1.61E+9.
Matt highlights that a study of 18 journals of published genome research between 2005 and 2015 found 35,175 Excel files from 3,597 pieces of research. Of these 19.6% of the Excel files contained errors caused by Excel. For example “22/12” could be “22 ÷ 12 = 1.8333..” or it could be “22nd December” or just the text “20/12”. There are genes out there in research papers called “March5” which should actually be called “5/3”
His humorous conclusion to all these problems was simply “…use a real database LIKE AN ADULT” which is easy to say but harder to put into practice. However with pimsimple you CAN store your product info in something better than Excel and you can do it without spending a sum of money that would induce Excel to put it into scientific notation.
