A common misuse of spreadsheets is as a substitute for a database. Interestingly, end users often take the limited data
to which they have direct access and place it in a spreadsheet format similar to that of the traditional, manual data
storage systems—which is precisely what the early DP specialists did when creating computerized data files. Due to
the large number of users with spreadsheets, each making separate copies of the data, the resulting “file system” of
spreadsheets suffers from the same problems as the file systems created by the early DP specialists, which are outlined
in the next section