Spreadsheet misuse

How many of you have experienced spreadsheet misuse in your company?

Seriously! It drives me insane when people send me some data in the form of a spreadsheet that was not generated as a csv from a database query to be used as read-only data. People use spreadsheets like they are a database and then inaccurate information spreads as they send copies around. It is absolute insanity.

My team pulled some of this data into a mysql db and provided some user interfaces. We are getting some sanity into the management of data now, but it will still take time to get some people to change their ways. Once people realise the time savings and data accuracy improvements, then everybody benefits.