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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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