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Comment by rrreese | Hacker News Reader

Excel 2007 was released in late 2006. Six and a half years have passed and two new versions have been released. It would be much more interesting to see the accuracy of the current version, then this very old version.

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They do one of these every iteration of Excel, and the results are usually similar. One day, Microsoft will make a good version of Excel, but I'm still waiting. http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~gmelard/rech/gmelard_csda23.pdf

Microsoft is likely to preserve some errors in the name of backwards compatibility. Spreadsheets that calculate different values in different versions are going to cause them more headaches from their customers than these reports of errors, as the people who care are already using other methods.

This is not far from the truth. In certain cases large solutions have been already developed to take into account any variation in implementation, accuracy or behavior.

With millions of custom solutions based on Excel floating around , "fixing" issues where calculations suddenly give different results would be highly counterproductive and potentially dangerous.

Sit down, have a drink, and think about what you are saying.

And yet, in your heart of hearts, you know mutagen's point to be true.

have to say mutagen is spot on.

I am still using 2003 at my company...

They are just now moving people off MSO 2003 at ours as well, following complaints from several people that they can't open the newer xlsx, docx, and accdb file extensions. IT and Clinical Analytics are the first wave to move to "brand new" MS Office 2010, as of Jan'13.

Sure hope you aren't doing any life-threatening numerical computations in your version of Excel!

It doesn't matter the version, if 2003 or 2020, I would never do life-threatening computations in Excel. It's just too painful and dangerous (look at how it treates dates). But unfurtunately I don't do this much, I do mostly finance-accounting. Yet, if I did, be sure I would have to put the results in a nicely formatted Excel file.

We got around the inaccuracy problems where I'm at by doing all the sensitive calculations in a more capable program (SAS where I'm at now--R when I consult), then exporting the results to Excel. It avoids most of the problems faced by the poor statistical tools in Excel. It's frustrating to think how difficult it is to cut Excel from the pipeline, but such is the dilemma with Excel being as virulent as it is.

IIRC there's a plugin that lets you call R functions within excel.

I always found much easier to do all the work in R or Python and then put the results in Excel. Excel is really not a good tool for things that go beyond additions and vlookups.

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