OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24250237/oceangate-titan-submarine-coast-guard-hearing-investigation

37 Comments

  1. Every company has their dirty secrets of some completely inappropriate tool that’s at the center of their business.

  2. I mean, it’s like finding out the Titanic had poor water pressure for the bathrooms. Sort of interesting, but overshadowed by the whole ‘hull failure in extreme conditions, leading to lots of people dying’ part.

  3. Of all the questionable decisions from that organization, this is the one that matters the least. So many companies still use hand typed excel spreadsheets.

  4. East_Jacket_7151 on

    One part of the vessle was secured with a ratchet strap. The last time a ratchet strap was on location was when this one woman floated away on a door.

  5. Hand-typed?

    A script-generated spreadsheet database would be weird. A manually written SQLite file would be insane.

    But an excel spreadsheet made on a typewriter is just industry standard at this point.

  6. You know this dude hasn’t got the slightest clue what he is talking about if he thinks using a spreadsheet is a bad thing.

  7. Excel is common in engineering applications as well as finance. It does numbers brilliantly. Some very high level engineering projects rely in some way on excel spreadsheets; you can’t really do much of the day-to-day number crunching without them.

  8. Reddit just wants to gloat on the fact that a bunch of rich people died and will up vote anything related to Titan.

  9. satanismymaster on

    The comments here are a little surprising. There’s nothing wrong with Excel, it’s a great tool and there’s a good reason it’s used everywhere. But, the issue isn’t Excel, the issue is their manual process for mapping the subs location. Their process was a huge step backwards from the industry standard.

    It’s easy to get lost down there, and it’s easier to prevent accidents if the subs location data is automatically loaded into mapping software. The coordinates themselves are just a string of numbers to us. Sure, they tell us exactly where the sub is but none of us could find 41.40338, 2.17403 until we plug it into some kind of mapping software.

    Having to transcribe that information into a notebook by hand, and enter it Excel, and then load it into mapping software – as a process – takes much more time than the automated systems we currently have. Things can go very bad down there, very quickly, and that extra time could cost lives. And since we have automated systems for this, it’s an unnecessarily dumb risk.

    That being said, this obviously wasn’t their dumbest decision. This just reinforces what we already knew about them.

  10. I want to make sure you’re sitting down for this. If you’re driving, pull over. If you’re drinking, start driving. All good? Okay. Here we go.

    Every company and organization of worth relies on hand typed Excel spreadsheets. Yep, in 2024. In fact most departments probably have a few. They might be on Google sheets now but they are still filling those cells. And I’d be more worried if they relied entirely on a dynamically or automatically generated spreadsheet, like a .csv output.

    Counselors are available for anyone who finds this particularly difficult.

  11. Excel is a brilliant programming tool.

    I flew and programmed UAVS in the military and as a civilian contractor. The civilian system I operated was programmed by an excel sheet built to each aircraft’s specs and each flight was programmed through dropdowns and a lot of FITB data cells.

    The civilian system was way more practical, user-friendly, efficient, and designed so much smarter.

  12. TheMillenniaIFalcon on

    This headline relies on people’s ignorance.

    Most probably don’t realize just how much relies on excel spreadsheet…

  13. It passes as the Minimum Viable Product. Not sure why anyone thinks that this would be an issue.

    /s, but in many cases, MVP is not sarcasm