This is my second post on understanding spreadsheets. In the first post I covered the deal that underlies spreadsheets and how the deal isn’t necessarily enough to know how to use spreadsheets effectively. This post covers the catch to using spreadsheets. Understanding the catch and its ramifications is important.

A catch? Yes - there is a catch to using spreadsheets. Otherwise it wouldn’t be news that the UK is missing 16,000 COVID cases being tracked in spreadsheets. If there wasn’t a catch we wouldn’t need spreadsheet warriors to help solve spreadsheet problems. There is definitely a catch to using spreadsheets.

But before I begin I need to make two separate apologies.

It helps to understand the deal in order to use software effectively. The deal is what the developers and programmers constructed into the program. You do some things and the software will do other things for you. There’s an implicit deal in well designed software.

Knowing the deal helps in using and understanding a program. I’ve already talked about the deal built in to word processors. For word processors the deal is reasonably obvious. When it comes to spreadsheets the deal isn’t as obvious. This is the first of two posts on using spreadsheets, the underlying deal, and the ramifications of that deal.