Excel help? imported data could be missing.

debitcardmayhem

Perhaps they are also using TalkTalk as their ISP, as a parting shot from Bilbo Harding (Baroness, sorry milady) 

tempus_fugit

Looks like I well and truly fell for this one. 😬

lr1277

Given the way covid testing was setup, I imagine this was a rush job, with little/no thought put into planning/consequences etc. Possibly given to the least experienced team member, with little or no direction.
I am surprised it wasn’t done in Access. But I suppose that would have meant thinking about table layouts and table structures. 

Andy_L

lr1277 said:

Given the way covid testing was setup, I imagine this was a rush job, with little/no thought put into planning/consequences etc. Possibly given to the least experienced team member, with little or no direction.
I am surprised it wasn’t done in Access. But I suppose that would have meant thinking about table layouts and table structures. 

The bit of the CS I used to work in only had the (cheaper) Access-less, version of Office.

Heedtheadvice

The bit of Health I worked in for a short time (long ago!) was well up to date. Although we used Excel extensively where appropriate we also used Access for simple 'bases, SQL for the more complex, bespoke for patient admission systems and the like, integrated packages to get the best out of all the bits and oracle for presenting data on the intranet......horses for courses.

But then again we had some sort of idea what we were doing and ensured as far as possible we got it right. Part of which was the basic design legwork and checking systems to ensure things worked properly! (It wa not NHS England by the way,......)

It is very easy to see the bad bits and believe it is typical and widespread but for such as we have been discussing it is getting on irresponsible at least to not ensure it was fit for purpose. Anybody remember that similar track and trace app that also fell by the wayside, and the... Plus several other IT projects? The old saying Rubbish in....

Lorian

Dear Dido, 
you'll have hit the 65535 row limit in Excel 2003 ;-)
You might want yo upgrade your pc, patch it and turn the antivirus on while you are at it, as well as getting a database system. 

onomatopoeia99

Neil_Jones said:

Nothing surprises me with IT and government, I believe a lot of NHS computer systems are still running on Windows XP for one reason or another.  Wouldn't surprise me if the rest of the the Health department is stuck on XP too.

So you know, that's completely inaccurate.
Where XP or older versions of Windows are still in use, it's because they are connected to specialized hardware that does not support newer versions of Windows.  As I'm sure you are fully aware as you seem well versed in the internals of the Windows kernel, the driver model was radically changed in Vista (to something sane, which it wasn't before) so a lot of existing specialist, very low volume hardware could not be used with that or newer OS versions as no new drivers were ever produced for some existing hardware.  This also explains why Windows 98 is still floating around in a few places, as the DOS kernel handled I/O in a completely different way from the NT kernel.

Neil_Jones

There's a difference between computers stuck on XP for hardware compatibility/legacy reasons, and computers stuck on XP because there's no budget to upgrade them.  The latter is usually because upgrades are done either "completely" or not at all, ie its pointless upgrading one computer in one office of one department at some random point in time as that generates a hybrid configuration - IT departments work better if things are "standard", as opposed to one office having a totally unique configuration (an exception is if something new is being rolled out).  its usually cheaper and more efficient to upgrade an entire department/wing/segment in one go, and that way you can replace everything to a new standard, so new base unit, new software, often replacement monitors, peripherals and hardware too, as from a purchasing point of view you often get more discount if you buy in bulk.

The former is usually caused by a (usually private) company having made a business decision at some point in the past and it coming back to bite them.  Some expensive bespoke equipment was bought and it only works on the software/OS of the time and it becomes a key part of the business, ie without it the company's dead in the water.   To replace it will cost the national debt, so the companies plough on until the entire equipment keels over and dies, and only at that point will they look at replacing it.  This may happen to an extent in the public sector too, thanks primarily (but not exclusively) to austerity.

Heedtheadvice

You help a lot on this forum with some excellent posts but crikey Neil where were you 40 years ago when waiting time for routine Orthopaedic surgery was several years? There was a cash shortage to tackle it then and pharmacy (the single biggest cost to the NHS after staffing) had to cut 10% off it's budget  owing to lack of money.....

It is not austerity that causes the intransigence but a general long term underfunding by many a government resulting in the stark choices that have to be made. Medical needs and Doctors and diagnostic equipment and pharmacy plus other tech (consider the cost of all the new scanners) nearly always win out and the often poor relations of IT are commonly well down the pecking order till it is found that there are shortcomings.

In the area I worked the IT staff were undervalued and there was a high turnover. Why work as an lowly 'administrator grade', thought by many to have no affect on the front line when you could double your salary (for example) by moving to finance and banking?

Not everyone moved on but too often it resulted in inexperienced staff learning systems and then were off. It's no wonder projects are often over cost, do not achieve objectives run over time in these areas?

I think there are parallels in several public services with too much reliance on grade structures rather than achievers!

inspectorperez

Heedtheadvice said:

You help a lot on this forum with some excellent posts but crikey Neil where were you 40 years ago when waiting time for routine Orthopaedic surgery was several years? There was a cash shortage to tackle it then and pharmacy (the single biggest cost to the NHS after staffing) had to cut 10% off it's budget  owing to lack of money.....

It is not austerity that causes the intransigence but a general long term underfunding by many a government resulting in the stark choices that have to be made. Medical needs and Doctors and diagnostic equipment and pharmacy plus other tech (consider the cost of all the new scanners) nearly always win out and the often poor relations of IT are commonly well down the pecking order till it is found that there are shortcomings.

In the area I worked the IT staff were undervalued and there was a high turnover. Why work as an lowly 'administrator grade', thought by many to have no affect on the front line when you could double your salary (for example) by moving to finance and banking?

Not everyone moved on but too often it resulted in inexperienced staff learning systems and then were off. It's no wonder projects are often over cost, do not achieve objectives run over time in these areas?

I think there are parallels in several public services with too much reliance on grade structures rather than achievers!

Very interesting to read your commentary and analysis of working within NHS IT departments. This does not surprise me in the slightest.
On an infinitely smaller scale within the accountancy profession, where my own firm had a network of circa 40 workstations dealing with client services, there was a constant resistance from some equity partners in spending money on computer upgrades and development. Particularly spending money on Microsoft licenses was often a controversial issue when older versions continued to perform, why “waste” money on the latest Office suite when the 5 year old version still worked fine. Even the IT consultants maintaining the systems were always cautious about the latest Windows versions which provided support in a perverse way to those not wishing to invest in the IT infrastructure. Microsoft were very cute in the way they sold licenses and their intellectual software rights were always well protected with an annual audit which would detect any license abuse. Extrapolate these numbers for the NHS for example and you are talking about a lot of money equivalent to x number of much needed beds I would imagine.
This may well be the sort of debate which goes on in government departments who for all we know could be using free open source software like Libre Office. I know one of my chums who is now retired but CS through and through, swears by Linux and that was the OS used in his department.