Here is "IT Mastery" at work:
The UK government lost 16,000 Covid cases because it was tracking cases in an Excel spreadsheet (as opposed to a database) but apparently didn't know how to use a spreadsheet. Instead of adding a new row for each case, they were adding a new column.
An Excel spreadsheet has a limit of 16,384 columns, but they didn't realize right away that they ran out of space, and kept adding cases—which are now lost.
© 2020 Praveen Puri
