Darwin awards for pathetic Spreadsheet Design

[brettdj]

Dave,
Hm, this is the major drawback when developing have been made by non-developers.

In my experience 100 % of all the files over 2-3 MB or sometimes even less have major errors in that they calculate wrong. I can live with poor design etc but never accept that a spreadsheet contain pure calculation errors. After all, it defeat the purpose why we use spreadsheets.

IMO Good spreadsheet design is all about transparency, consistency and text explanatons. Non developers can produce very good models - one of the functions of my coporate group is to set, maintain and teach these principles. And we actively discourage "complex" Excel model feaurues such as VBA, there really is no need for it in an evaluation model

Now to my question: Why do You review disasters like the one You do?

Kind regards,
Dennis

Its part of my job All significant investing decisions are reviewed by the group I work in

I bounced back the first model to the CFO of that business unit and I told them it had to be rebuilt from scratch

No such luck with model #2. It came from an external party - we will strip out the gumph and rebuild it into a well laid model of less than 1 MB .. with calculation on.

My capacity to be amazed at very smart people building very poor models is yet to be exhausted

Cheers

Dave