Darwin awards for pathetic Spreadsheet Design
In my job I get to look a lot of big evaluation models. I see many, many, many bad ones .... to the point where I open them up, say "$%#$%^" and anyone who overhears me knows what I am looking at. But in the last fortnight I have seen two complete disasters and I need to share/vent/lampoon before I endure any more pain.
The contenders for Spreadsheet nightmares of November 2005 are:
- The Array Formula nightmare.
Every single formula in a 165 worksheet was entered as an range entered array. Even a formula like A1+A2 would be entered as A1:S1+A2:S2 ...... meaning that no formulas could be entered in isolation, no columns could be inserted etc. I won't even begin to mention the 5500 range names, 113 macros, the 50 hidden sheets or the 30Mb file size. - The INDIRECT VLOOKUP nightmare.
INDIRECT is used to feed in an entire sheet as the lookup range - for around 1000 calculations. I wonder why that model was sent to me with calculation turned to manual.
Other entries welcomed and encouraged