List of spreadsheet mistakes

This is a list of spreadsheet mistakes summarized as a table, including information about when the incident was reported, the organization(s) it involved, a brief description of the incident, and what was the main spreadsheet mistake issue.

A 2017 study concluded that up to 90% of spreadsheets had errors that affected their results. Moreover, a 2026 survey by San Francisco-based business operations software startup DOSS, shows that 22% operation professionals deal with spreadsheet errors every day at work. Of those respondents, 59% say the most common error was manual data entry mistakes and 46% of respondents say that the second most common error was in spreadsheet formulas. +DateOrganizationDescriptionIssueJanuary 1995Fidelity InvestmentsA $2.6 billion miscalculation after an accountant accountant omitted the minus sign on a net capital loss of $1.3 billionOmitted minus signJune 2003TransAltaA $24 million loss from buying more US power transmission hedging contracts at higher pricesCut and paste issueNovember 2005KodakAn $11 million severance error was due to accidentally adding too many zeros to a single employee's accrued severanceManual data entryOctober 2008BarclaysUnintentionally revealing 179 contracts Lehman Brothers had intended to tradeHidden columnsJuly 2011MI5A spreadsheet formatting error in 2010 caused MI5 to wrongly collect subscriber data on 134 telephone numbers due to the actual last three digits of telephone numbers being changed to ending in 000Formatting errorMay 2012JPMorgan ChaseA $6 billion loss when a Value-at-Risk model was miscalculatedCut and paste issueAugust 2016N/AResearch on estimating that one-fifth of papers with supplementary material containing Excel gene lists to have erroneous gene name conversionsAutomatic formattingSeptember 2016LazardLazard undervalued SolarCity's valuation by $400 million when performing discounted cash flow valuation analysesDouble-countedOctober 2020Public Health EnglandDue to Excel's one million-row spreadsheet limit,15,841 positive Covid tests were left off of the official daily figuresRow limitsDecember 2021Crypto.comAccidental manual entry caused a $100 refund to be a $10.47 million transferManual data entryAugust 2023Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI)In response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request, the PSNI had accidentally shared names and personal details of 10,000 serving police and civilian personnelOverlooked spreadsheet

List of spreadsheet mistakes

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