Calgary, Canada – April 29, 2003, 9:17 AM

Sarah looked at the clock on her computer screen. Three more hours before the bids for electricity contracts in New York had to be submitted. As a senior analyst at TransAlta Corporation, she had overseen this process dozens of times. The spreadsheet in front of her contained months of analysis – transmission paths, capacity costs, strategic bids. Everything neatly laid out in Excel.

“The deadline is coming up, Sarah. Are we ready?” her manager called from his office.

“Almost ready!” she replied, while her fingers danced over the key combinations she knew by heart. Control+C to copy a series of numbers from column D. Control+V to paste them into column F. Simple work – she did this daily.

But today was different. As she was copying the data, the phone rang. A colleague with an urgent question about another project. During the conversation, she kept the mouse cursor over the spreadsheet. Unconsciously, her hand shifted a millimeter. When she stopped talking and pressed Control+V, the cursor was one row higher than intended.

The high bids intended for premium transmission routes – the expensive, strategically important paths where TransAlta deliberately wanted to pay more – were now linked to cheap routes that barely needed capacity. And vice versa: the low bids for unimportant routes were placed on the expensive premium paths.

Sarah looked at the screen. The numbers still looked like numbers. The formulas still checked out. The sum of all bids was still correct. Excel gave no error message – because technically there was no error. The software had done exactly what it was told to do.

At 11:45 AM, Sarah sent the spreadsheet to the New York Independent System Operator. “Bids are in,” she emailed the management team. “Everything looks good.”

The calm before the storm

The weeks that followed proceeded as usual at TransAlta. The company, one of Canada’s largest power producers, was running at full capacity. Other projects, other deadlines, other spreadsheets. The electricity contracts in New York seemed routine – just part of their North American strategy.

Until May 27, 2003.

That morning, Sarah received an email from the New York ISO. “Congratulations on your successful bids,” it read. “Attached you will find the allocations for May.”

As she opened the file, she felt a knot in her stomach. TransAlta had won – much more than expected. Too much. They had received capacity on transmission channels they never wanted to bid on. And at prices that were astronomically high.

With trembling hands, she opened the original bid spreadsheet. Row by row, she compared the intended bids with what had actually been submitted. There, in column F, she saw it. The shift. One row. A millimeter mouse movement during a phone call.

“Oh no…” she whispered.

The bill

It took days before the full impact became clear. TransAlta’s finance team worked day and night to calculate the damage. The result was devastating: 24 million dollars. In euros: nearly 24 million euros in unintended contracts.

The company had paid sky-high prices for transmission capacity they couldn’t use. At the same time, they had received too little on routes that were crucial for their operations. The arbitrage opportunities they wanted to exploit had evaporated. Worse still – they were stuck with the contracts. Once allocated by the ISO, these could no longer be canceled.

Steve Snyder, president of TransAlta, faced the most difficult press conference of his career. On June 4, 2003, he had to explain to shareholders, employees, and the media how a company with billions in annual revenue could lose 24 million through a typo.

“It was literally a cut-and-paste error in an Excel spreadsheet that we did not detect when we performed our final checks,” he told The Globe and Mail. “A human error with enormous financial consequences.”

For TransAlta, this loss meant 10 percent of their annual profit. For Sarah, it meant months of investigations, procedures, and the knowledge that one unfortunate moment had changed her career and the company forever.

Why this story is still relevant today

More than twenty years later, TransAlta’s story is no longer unique – it has become prophetic. In the digital economy of 2025, thousands of Dutch companies still rely on Excel spreadsheets and manual data entry for critical business processes. The tools may have become more modern, but the risks are greater than ever.

Every day, Dutch employees make millions of copy-paste actions. Every day, cursors shift unnoticed. Every day, phones ring while entering crucial data. The difference from 2003? The data is now larger, the processes more complex, and the financial impact potentially even more devastating.

This is the story of how one wrong mouse click nearly brought down a multinational. But above all, it’s the story of why data-entry automation is no longer a luxury, but a business necessity in a world where human errors can cause millions in damages.

Because the question is not whether errors are made – the question is how much they will cost you.