I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every week as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
What are some of the hazards of using a data processing spreadsheet?
Let’s say you want to develop a spreadsheet that’s used over and over again to process batches of data.
What are the some of the hazards to data integrity associated with using such a spreadsheet?
- It might have bugs in it at the time of release.
- Its functionality might change unintentionally during use.
- Someone could use it incorrectly.
- Someone could enter incorrect data.
- Someone could accidentally change data that’s already been entered.
- The software or computer could crash during data entry or processing.
- The spreadsheet full of data could get lost or corrupted.
- The spreadsheet could give different results on different computers with different versions of Excel.
- You could end up with multiple versions of the spreadsheet without knowing which is the ‘correct’ one.
… and so on.
That’s a lot of hazards, and we haven’t yet gone into any specifics about the functionality of the spreadsheet, or even the kind of data it will be processing! Which of these should we be concerned about?
Until next time, thanks for reading!
– Brendan
p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website.
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I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every week as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
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