>Some things about the dataset: It’s very messy – triple quotes, semicolons, commas, oh my. There are a millions of systems alerts. For seattle.gov → seattle.gov communication, there are two distinct metadata records
Opening a file of that size in Excel would probably crash the desktop. And this was probably a lowly admin without a lot of other tools.
The first 256 char of a lot of system emails are going to just have junk html and header tags. If you don't understand that you are looking at HTML, it's not going to be apparent that you are looking at the body of an email.
It's a rookie mistake to be sure, but the admin was clearly unfamiliar with what was being requested.
Would it really have been a XLS file? I would expect probably CSV? In that case, just running 'less' on the file (or the Microsoft equivalent) would be fine, and wouldn't tax anyone's desktop resources.
Opening a file of that size in Excel would probably crash the desktop. And this was probably a lowly admin without a lot of other tools.
The first 256 char of a lot of system emails are going to just have junk html and header tags. If you don't understand that you are looking at HTML, it's not going to be apparent that you are looking at the body of an email.
It's a rookie mistake to be sure, but the admin was clearly unfamiliar with what was being requested.