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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

I have the impression today you will be one of the 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/

But you are correct, this entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense... :-)

"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

"Classification of Spreadsheet Errors" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224

"A study conducted by Coopers & Lybrand found errors in 90% of the spreadsheets audited."

"Impact of Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" - https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715

"What We Don’t Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601

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You don't really deserve a response, but even the idea that you could tell someone to not use Excel for accounting and seriously project that you know anything about how accounting works in the real world is hilarious.

You could think 500 random internet articles - it doesn't matter. The assertion is still ridiculous. You literally will not be able to get a job as an accountant without being able to use Excel. Don't be an idiot.

You can also link to hundreds of articles showing that dynamic types cause errors. People don't care, they still use them when it makes sense to use them. There is no better mainstream alternative for accounting than Excel right now, period.

Not a single reply on the technical and governance arguments?

I think we agree...this site is indeed full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense. :-)

No, not a single reply, because your statement wasn't "Excel can cause problems sometimes". That's a different conversation. You said "Don't use Excel for accounting", which is something you could only say if you have no idea at all about how accounting works in the real world.

I'm not arguing about whether or not Excel is perfect, or if it causes problems, or if it makes demons fly out of your nose. I am educating you about the real world and how it's important to understand that no matter how "well akshually" technically correct you are, it doesn't matter at all if the advice you're giving is WRONG and not useful to people.

So, I repeat. Idiots confidently spouting nonsense.

Hah. These are the same weirdos who spoke like this to Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

There's a big difference between geeks and hippies. Too many of the former here and not enough of the latter here - people who can understand other people, culture etc and then think about how technology can fit into ones life.

It's shocking and honestly pathetic. "Hey guys the software you use is not accurate" being met with such derision is how we regress as a society, not move forward.

nothing is accurate in the hands of incompetent people

Did you actually read these or just Google for problems?

> "Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel"

Well.. yes? That's what floating point numbers do.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40168077/floating-point-...

So what?

> "Classification of Spreadsheet Errors"

It's a taxonomy of the types of bugs spreadsheets have.

There are these for most other programming languages too.

etc, etc

Look, my first job was translating an Excel spreadsheet into an actual application and we found errors all the time.

Once Excel spreadsheets get too complicated they tend to fall apart. This is very well known by people who use it heavily.

It doesn't mean that it is useless.

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