Skip to content

Miscellaneous

Jump to bottom
Asbjørn Skødt edited this page Aug 28, 2023 · 17 revisions

Interesting references

What Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python) thinks of Excel:

Video about the first spreadsheet application:

Link to international spreadsheets risk interest group:

Article by Dr. Victoria Lemieux:

Notable excerpts from Lemieux's article

Archiving: The Overlooked Spreadsheet Risk (2005) by Dr. Victoria Lemieux.

p. 1

...spreadsheets may be used to perform reconciliations by downloading information from two systems into separate MS Excel spreadsheets. MS Excel functions and pivot tables are then used to create summary data for each source.

p. 2

...discussion of SOX archiving requirements and how to mitigate archiving risks and introduce into an organisation best spreadsheet archiving practices for SOX compliance.

Equally important, however, are the risks associated with failing to properly archive spreadsheets.

Why should spreadsheet archiving be considered a critical risk area? Simple: there are risks to the business when critical information is not properly retained and accessible, especially in the post-SOX world.

p.3

Lemieux uses an example of improper spreadsheet archiving in the article, that was characterized by:

  • Individualistic naming of files
  • Ad hoc assignment of storage location
  • Absence of any objective criteria governing deletion of spreadsheets from storage; no understanding of spreadsheets as "records" that needed to be kept as evidence
  • Failure to preserve a link to the business context in which spreadsheets were created
  • Inability to guarantee the authenticity and reliability of spreadsheets; no effort was made to "lock" down their content as part of a formal archiving process; after a period of time the integrity was seriously questionable

p. 4

Many still rely on back up processes better suited to disaster recovery than to the preservation of evidence to meet legal and regulatory requirements.

p. 5

It is best to address spreadsheet archiving as part of setting up (if there is no programme in place), maintaining and ensuring compliance with an organisation-wide records management programme.

Good records management practice calls for the establishment of Records Retention Schedules. These are documents that identify the records that must be created by law or regulation, and the period of time for which those records must be retained.

...the U.S. courts have shown a distinct favouritism for the submission of evidence in its "native" form (i.e. electronic) rather than receiving a paper "copy".

p. 6

...there is the question of whether removing the records from their business context has the potential to diminish the evidentiary qualities of the records. Unless carefully procedurally contreolled, there easily could be a danger of reduced record integrity. Therefore, a better approach is to identify the records, properly manage and archive them "in situ" (i.e., winthin a production environment) or a corporate archiving environment, and apply appropriate indexing for retrieval.

Steps must be taken to ensure that spreadsheet content, sctructure and contect, that is the links to the business transactions, that they were created to support, are retained for their required period of time in a form acceptable to regulators, investigators and the courts.

Jokes

I was trying to calculate the sum of all fears, but Open XML told me this information was classified.

I tried to calculate 2+2, but I did not Excel.

(a joke with a Radiohead reference wow!)

Clone this wiki locally