Do you have Numerica Diarrhea?

Dear Exce-lent,

First , let's wish ourselves a happy Eid-el-Fitr! 

If you have been close to the media space of recent, then "Numerica Diarrhea" is a word you should be familiar with by now.

Quoting from some of the media extracts on "Numerica Diarrhea",  “The allegation by Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State that former Minister of Finance Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala spent $1 billion out of the Excess Crude Account to fund the re-election bid of former President Jonathan is the kind of ludicrously false statement that has unfortunately become a trademark of the Governor in his public campaign of falsehood against Dr Okonjo-Iweala,” the statement said.

“The statement is just another example of the numerical diarrhea that seems to have afflicted His Excellency in recent times in his effort to damage the reputation of the former Minister.

“He has, within the last few months, asked Dr Okonjo-Iweala to explain all kinds of totally wild and unsubstantiated figures, ranging from $30 billion, $20 billion, $2.1 billion, N720 billion and now $1 billion.”

I have shared this piece not to discuss on political matters, but rather reflect on the underlying embarrassments your inconsistent data mindset can cause you. Imagine yourself, an MIS/team lead/data/transaction advisory personnel providing data information that management would take a business decision on after following your simple advice and just few moments later to discover that your figures were wrong and again wrong!

Today, people and organizations have suffered from losses arising out of human error on their use of excel rather than error from excel itself and in most of these cases, excel had been implicated. 

Risk Interest Groups have said this isn't about software defects within the applications, such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice. The problems associated with a spreadsheet ordinarily do not reside in the software program itself. It's those imperfect human beings who are using the applications: inputting data, copying and pasting numbers from row to row and column to column, and writing inaccurate formulae. "Research has repeatedly shown that an alarming proportion of corporate spreadsheet models are not tested to the extent necessary to support directors' fiduciary, reporting and compliance obligations," says the EuSpRIG website. 

We have all read about the Harvard economists Reinhart and Rogoff’s most famous finding that countries with a debt exceeding 90 per cent of their annual GDP experienced slower growth than their thriftier peers, being debunked by a 28-year-old student. Thomas Herndon, a graduate in the economics department at Amherst College in Massachusetts, found that they had made fundamental mathematical errors because of a botched Excel spreadsheet. More detail about this can be found here 

It would also be good to read Eight of the Worst Spreadsheet Blunders committed by humans who i will say were suffering from "Numerica Diarrhea" and see what spreadsheet typos and oversights caused them. 

I had once read a published Audited reports submitted by a topmost big 4 Nigerian Audit firm that contained the "#N/A" error boldly printed on one of the figure lines and knew the report wasn't just subjected for thorough review or was that just an oversight when it could have been suppressed by a simple "IFERROR" formula?

Whilst you think about this, i know of a truth, that all of these errors are avoidable! Excel is great as an application but are you an Excel-lent user or do you have Numerica Diarrhea?

Oladapo Sorinola 

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