Thread · 2 tweets · 5 Oct 2020

It appears that they used one column per case rather than rows. This matches my experience with Excel in the wild: you *can* use it as a fine and non-expert data system, but it’s also a hell of a footgun in the hands of people who don’t have at least minimal data literacy.

Something like FileMaker, Airtable, or essentially anything that asks you what data you want to capture and then sets it up for you is likely to be better suited for this. Not that this glitch is unique… I’ve helped the NYT team collecting that data and… I’ve seen things.