Blog: Computing Consultancy

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You find me in slightly GRUMPY mood this morning, a mood i think i probably share with quite a few of my FELLOW ENGLISHERS. My thoughts on the matter are THIS: we've tried a Foreign Manager, we've tried and English Manager, SURELY now is the time and get someone BRITISH, but not ENGLISH? Maybe Northern Irish?

And in other news - it would be nice to be AGHAST at the stupidity going on with these CDs full of DATA that have got lost, but instead here is some COST SAVING ADVICE for Public Sector Management who think that removing data would be TOO EXPENSIVE.

1. Save a copy of the data you wish to send out.
2. Open the copy.
3. Right-click on the header for column containing the data you want to remove.
4. Left-click "Delete".
5. Repeat until all offending columns are removed, then save and close the file.
6. Burn the file onto a CD, remembering to password protect it*.
7. Delete the copy.

That's be FIFTY THOUSAND QUID please, The Government!

* I have occasionally needed to get data from Government Departments for PROFESSIONAL REASONS, which is why i'm pretty sure that the data they've lost will be in an Excel Spreadsheet. They DID always password protect it, but would often forget to let us know what the password was - one time I asked if they could possibly pass this information on to us, and they kindly did so... by writing the password on the CD.

GRUMPINESS LEVELS: NOT DECREASING.

posted 22/11/2007 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

Can you get 25 million rows in an Excel spreadsheet?
posted 22/11/2007 by Dan

I think that comes in Windows Illuminati Edition doesn't it?
posted 23/11/2007 by MJ Hibbett

You can only fit 65,536 in a single worksheet, but the number or worksheets in a single file are limited only by the available RAM in the PC client.

It would require nearly 400 worksheets - which seems a bit excessive

Or they could have split it up over several excel files

yes I bet that's how they did it
posted 23/11/2007 by Francis

Maybe Access, or SQL or something can handle that much data. In any case, not exactly a difficult procedure to anonymise/cut down the data in the way that was required. I've covered similar in ECDL and even sideline IT modules in a largely unrelated college course. It's pure laziness and stupidity, that's all. Probably on behalf of a manager telling an unfortunate subordinate what to do, the subordinate saying "er, hang on, shouldn't we cut such-and-such out first?" and catching holy hell for it because "THATS JUST THE WAY WE DO IT" regardless of how stupid/dangerous/needlessly lazy that way is.... which I've run into on a personal basis before in other jobs.

Interestingly this isn't the first report I've seen of passworded governmental files being distributed with the password written on the disc itself... obviously someone in the office was taking a little too much of a hint from how dodgy copies of Windows and Office themselves get distributed and didn't realise that Passwords =/= Serial Numbers.

It's totally beyond me why they didn't just stick the thing in a strongly encrypted RAR and pipe it over a HM Govt FTP connection, HTTPS hosted site or something. These days, far far faster, cheaper, easier and more secure than posting sensitive data on physical media.
posted 30/11/2007 by tahrey

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