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Don't do stats with excel. It's all wrong, Microsoft won't fix the bugs. They really kind of earned their reputation in an honest and direct fashion. Aversion
by harry8 7y ago
Don't do stats with excel. It's all wrong, Microsoft won't fix the bugs.
They really kind of earned their reputation in an honest and direct fashion. Aversion to Microsoft works great, doesn't it? Need a spreadsheet? Use gnumeric. Calculation errors are bugs and those bugs get fixed.
- nnghj 7y ago> Don't do stats with excel. It's all wrong, Microsoft won't fix the bugs. e.g?
- jevgeni 7y agoI know of some numerical instability and a faulty or inefficient implementation of the normal distribution formulas (NORM.INV, I believe). Was a while back when I ran into this, so can't give more details. That being said, basic financial modelling in Excel is killer.
- pjc50 7y agoDon't do genetics with Excel either. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
- ska 7y agoSee, for example these slides: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/TheresaScott/StatsInExcel.TAScott.slides.pdf http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/TheresaScott/... Or more formally papers like: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-014-0482-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-014-0482-5 Both of which are a bit out of date so some things may have been fixed. It's generally not a great platform for numeric work, but some things can be improved if you know the issues. For examples the last time I checked (a while ago) things like sum/std/mean would not do anything intelligent with large columns/rows leading to accumulation errors if you did it naively, but you can work around stuff like that if you know it is there... but you will end up re implementing which makes it painful