Microsoft Excel’s bloopers reel: 40 years of spreadsheet errors

But as the spreadsheet software celebrates its 40th birthday, spare a thought for those who misplaced a decimal, left out a row or got their cut and paste wrong. Here are some of the most memorable examples.

In 2010, two respected economists released a paper that made an influential case for the years of austerity that followed. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argued in Growth in a Time of Debt that once a government’s debt reaches 90% of gross domestic product – a measure of a country’s economic output – growth goes into reverse.

However, in 2013 it emerged that the Harvard economists had made an error in an Excel spreadsheet: instead of falling by 0.1%, their work should have found that the economies in question grow by 2.2%.

“It is sobering that such an error slipped into one of our papers,” they said in a statement. They nonetheless stood by their broad conclusion – debt hinders growth – but the error was jumped on by critics.

Fannie Mae, the US mortgage lender, issued a quarterly results statement in 2003 containing accounting errors that totalled more than $1bn. Fannie Mae said the mistakes were due to a company accountant putting the wrong formula into an Excel spreadsheet, as the financial firm sought to comply with a new accounting standard.

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