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It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (defector.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

excel math is fine if you use the syntax correctly. Its problems are mostly assume many number inputs as dates and other performance issues. Doing math wrong is not one of them.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    No there were math errors. Was it using statistical functions? I can't recall, I just know we had to double check everything.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They've also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.

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