this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
898 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
74292 readers
4486 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They already did that with visual basic and excel. Anyone remember when excels math was, just sorta right?
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.
No there were math errors. Was it using statistical functions? I can't recall, I just know we had to double check everything.
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.
https://www.mrexcel.com/excel-tips/bug-with-rand-in-excel-2003/
How long back? IEEE 754 floating point was released the same year as Excel v1, and it'd be a while before there was hardware support. Floating point numbers were often dodgey back then on just about everything.