The hard cell
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Barclays bank's law firm learns the dangers of untrained Microsoft Excel users - the hard way
Microsoft’s spreadsheet application Excel is a tool that many businesses would struggle to do without. Much of the world’s most important business data is stored, manipulated and shared in the ubiquitous .xls file format – often in spite of the best efforts of IT departments.
Notwithstanding its pivotal role in modern business administration, few employees have received any formal training in how to use Excel – or even opened the help menu. And as a high-profile case of corporate carelessness demonstrated in October 2008, that can often have dire consequences.
When Barclays Capital, the investment division of the high-street bank, agreed to buy certain assets from investment bank Lehman Brothers after it collapsed, an Excel document was prepared listing all the assets that Barclays wished to acquire.
The document contained hidden cells, in which were listed assets that Barclays did not wish to acquire. When a junior employee at Barclay’s law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton was formatting this document to be sent to Lehmans’ representatives (around midnight), they accidentally included all the previously hidden rows.
This meant Barclays Capital was unwittingly proposing to acquire 179 contracts from Lehmans’ books that it had explicitly declined. The law firm was forced to submit a shame-faced request for the document to be struck from the record on grounds of error.
Further reading
Spreadsheet creep
The ‘spreadmarts’ created using desktop tools have become the enemy of corporate-wide data consistency
The spread of intelligence
The challenges - and benefits - of spreadsheets and their popularity
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