What it costs when it goes wrong
In 2012, the "London Whale" trading losses, ultimately exceeding $6 billion were compounded by errors in a risk-model spreadsheet, including a manual copy-paste mistake.
— JPMorgan Chase internal task force report, 2013
A spreadsheet error by the organizing committee led to roughly 10,000 more tickets being sold for a synchronized swimming event than there were seats available.
— 2012 London Olympics ticketing
Academic research into real-world spreadsheets has repeatedly found meaningful error rates in spreadsheet formulas once a sheet grows past a trivial size, and most of those errors are never caught before they cause damage.
— Panko et al., spreadsheet error research
A sturdier foundation
Rather than letting a spreadsheet grow into an unofficial database, structured web-app tools let a team keep the same flexibility to define custom fields and forms, while adding what spreadsheets lack:
Validated, typed fields at the point of entry
Full revision history
Safe concurrent multi-user access, no more "who has the file open"
Permissions by group or role, not "whoever has the attachment"
Learn more
See Tiki Trackers for how WikiSuite replaces spreadsheet-as-database with a proper structured data tool.