microsoft excel has previously been implicated in the “London Whale” trading debacle ( goose pimply truth quote on the article for anyone who works with the program every day, “While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number.” ). now it turns out there were erroneous excel calculations in a study used by politicians to support austerity policies that slash social programs( and lest you think this just affects the world of economics and finance, browse “gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics” ). and those were both user defined errors! some of us are old enough to remember the essay by joel spolsky, a former excel program manager, on an infamous excel 2007 bug where multiplying 77.1*850 yielded 100,000 and not the correct 65,535. how of of those do you think are still out in the wild.