This article speaks volumes about their internal IT Governance and process.
https://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-ex...
> JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office needed a new value-at-risk (VaR) model for the synthetic credit portfolio (the one that blew up) and assigned a quantitative whiz (“a London-based quantitative expert, mathematician and model developer” who previously worked at a company that built analytical models) to create it. The new model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.” The internal Model Review Group identified this problem as well as a few others, but approved the model, while saying that it should be automated and another significant flaw should be fixed.* After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors...
It creates the mindset of, let me do a little everyday to make this a more automated process.
That turned ~4 hrs/day of reports into an automated system, gave me a good understanding of how the various systems and reports work together, and helped me get my first promotion.
I've moved on to a new role where I'm doing the same thing on a process which has been void of substantial improvements for 3+ years. There's always something, and I can remove a bit more time with every automation iteration.
The csvkit toolset – particularly `in2csv` [0] and `csvsql`, which, respectively, can be used to extract CSV from Excel sheets and import/insert directly into sqlite – make frequent appearances in my daily work these days.
Though admittedly, I don't know what options there are to distangle spreadsheets that aren't just data (e.g. intertwined formulas).
[0] https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/scripts/in2csv.html
[1] https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/scripts/csvsql.html
You'd be surprised.
Excel files are used to handle trillions (not billions) of dollars in businesses, even for the most critical processes...
It is very easy to train people on how to use excel if they are willing to invest the time to learn formulas, and once you learn VB, you will be tempted to do most data presentation in Excel.
That said, just because most people know how to use Excel does not mean they are technically capable of setting up things like version control, backups, validation or security. A lot of users I have worked with in addition get their files from someone else, who may not even work at the company anymore and they have no idea what is or could be running in the background or how exactly the calculation in certain cells is done. Further, it is very common that one technically capable person creates an excel that becomes a crux of an internal process simply because it is the easiest thing to use, once IT governence policies are put in place, it doesn't help because they damage lies in the fundamental data they started with.
Tl;dr it is more common and innocent than it seems.