Talking about "blame" unnecessarily and counter-productively moves the conversation into a moral perspective. Replace "blame" with "finding defects", and the articles absurdity becomes obvious.<p>Do spreadsheet programs have defects? Yes.<p>Do those defects cause errors? Yes.<p>Can those defects be fixed? Also yes.<p>Look at the two recent examples of gene names turned into dates by Excel, and the xls 64k line limit that caused COVID cases to be ignored. Those user traps shouldn't be dismissed with "only a fool blames their tool".
If a surgeon operates on me with a dirty teaspoon he found on the floor outside the operating theatre, I don't blame that spoon. But the surgeon should face some consequences and <i>not do it again</i>.<p>From the BBC website on the XLS affair: <i>To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates in order to make sure none hit their cap.</i>