6 ms·

Does economics have peer-review? Excel is tolerated in an academic journal?

by trhtrsh 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago
What do you mean "Excel is tolerated in an academic journal?" Excel is a perfectly fine tool for doing all sorts of data analysis without knowing how to program. This same error could've been done in a "real" programming language just by messing up some subscripts.
- salman89 14y ago
  It is much harder to peer review for errors than code.
  - jpadkins 14y ago
    Not really. You start from the solution cells and work backwards. It might be easier than reviewing a functional programming language that does the same work. Think about all the accounting and financial decisions that is reviewed in excel. They are vitally important to get correct.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group[1] has a list of spreadsheet errors. (http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm) There are lots of errors in accounting and financial spreadsheets. It's vitally important that traders enter the correct numbers when making trades, but 'fat finger errors' happen pretty often. Ray Panko has a lot of useful research about spreadsheets. Part of the problems he identifies are difficulties in auditing and finding errors. [1] (http://www.eusprig.org/ http://www.eusprig.org/) [2] (http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/ http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/) My internet is flaky, and none of the links I find work.
    - salman89 14y ago
      Going cell by cell in a backwards fashion seems to be a tedious way of checking for errors, and goes against your normal logical flow (forwards).
      - rayiner 14y ago
        If you're a a programmer in a typical imperative language, sure. If your familiarity is with data flow or functional languages, you work backwards all the time (or rather, you work top down, from the highest level of generality to the lowest level of detail).
  - tbrownaw 14y ago
    I thought code written for science papers was generally crap (from a maintenance/review perspective, because the people who write it are scientists first and programmers second), and often not published anyway? The idea behind not publishing being that if someone tries to reproduce your work, it's best to make certain the won't reproduce your coding bugs by copying (and also that publishing crap code is embarrassing)...
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I disagree. Excel has several features that make it easier to review: 1) You can generally count on built-in formulas to be correct, which might have to be recreated in a different language; 2) Excel programs have a highly stylized control flow that's so simple that you don't even really have to explicitly consider it--you just look at the data flow and assume the engine gets the control flow right; 3) Excel has built in visual aids to help you catch off-by-one errors and the like, as well as charting capabilities to help you see if intermediate variables are behaving the way they ought to behave. And have you ever seen say a Matlab script written by a researcher? Researchers outside CS (and many researchers inside CS) write terrible code, because that's not their job. I'd much rather debug an Excel file written by an economist than a Matlab program.
    - enjo 14y ago
      You can generally count on built-in formulas to be correct, which might have to be recreated in a different language;* At one point, at least, this wasn't true. At Quickoffice we ran into all sorts of problems implementing functions as our results didn't match what Excel would display. It was fascinating. Ours were mathematically correct, but "Excel correct" is what our users wanted. Most of the errors where inherited from very early versions of Excel. Instead of fixing the formula, they would just replicate the bug to keep everything consistent. I'm straining to remember the specific examples (there were many), but it's been quite a few years since I was around that stuff.
      - brodney 14y ago
        Those stories always make for a good read. I'm interested in examples if you can think of any.
      - pseut 14y ago
        Some examples here for Excel 2007: http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2007/10/02/excel-2007-bug-shows-wrong-answers-to-simple-multiplications/ http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2007/10/02/excel-2007-bug-shows-w... one example from the post: 425 * 154.2 was displayed as 100,000 and treated as 100000 for some calculations but not others. I remember older versions of Excel having similar (but not exactly the same) problems in basic mathematical operations too, but can't remember exactly what they were.
- minimax 14y ago
  It's good for doing one-time analyses, but hard to automate when you have many inputs that are updated as time passes, or if you need to feed the output of one spreadsheet into another. Tangentially related: I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables. I think the analogues might have some pedagogical value.
  - 1337biz 14y ago
    * They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables.* You are very optimistic here... Very optimistic. My guess is that 90% of excel users are at a maximum using the sorting button.
    - gknoy 14y ago
      Also, many 2d arrays of cells which represent data, and progressive calculations. And table lookups. This is, understandably, fun to debug.
  - shrikant 14y ago
    > I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables. A not-insignificant part of my previous job was training Excel users to use non-Excel reporting and analysis tools. I believe I can say honestly say that 100% of them had no idea of arrays or variables, and only about a third of them even used the built-in Excel functions.
    - minimax 14y ago
      But could you explain variables and arrays in terms of spreadsheet cells and rows (or columns)? That is what I was thinking would be useful.
  - chernevik 14y ago
    I teach a short session on moving analysis from Excel to SQL. Many power Excel users make the jump pretty smoothly. Once you get them thinking about a work flow moving from one table to another, they get it. But we're talking here about some very bright people accustomed basically hacking the one thing they know to get results. It's a subset of "Excel users" generally.
tptacek 14y ago
If you really don't believe Excel is safe for real analysis, you have much bigger things to be scared about than academic journals.
- gohrt 14y ago
  Such as the worldwide financial system.

Does economics have peer-review? Excel is tolerated in an academic journal?

by trhtrsh 14y ago

Does economics have peer-review? Excel is tolerated in an academic journal?

What do you mean "Excel is tolerated in an academic journal?" Excel is a perfectly fine tool for doing all sorts of data analysis without knowing how to program. This same error could've been done in a "real" programming language just by messing up some subscripts.

salman89 14y ago
It is much harder to peer review for errors than code.
- jpadkins 14y ago
  Not really. You start from the solution cells and work backwards. It might be easier than reviewing a functional programming language that does the same work. Think about all the accounting and financial decisions that is reviewed in excel. They are vitally important to get correct.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group[1] has a list of spreadsheet errors. (http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm) There are lots of errors in accounting and financial spreadsheets. It's vitally important that traders enter the correct numbers when making trades, but 'fat finger errors' happen pretty often. Ray Panko has a lot of useful research about spreadsheets. Part of the problems he identifies are difficulties in auditing and finding errors. [1] (http://www.eusprig.org/ http://www.eusprig.org/) [2] (http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/ http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/) My internet is flaky, and none of the links I find work.
  - salman89 14y ago
    Going cell by cell in a backwards fashion seems to be a tedious way of checking for errors, and goes against your normal logical flow (forwards).
    - rayiner 14y ago
      If you're a a programmer in a typical imperative language, sure. If your familiarity is with data flow or functional languages, you work backwards all the time (or rather, you work top down, from the highest level of generality to the lowest level of detail).
- tbrownaw 14y ago
  I thought code written for science papers was generally crap (from a maintenance/review perspective, because the people who write it are scientists first and programmers second), and often not published anyway? The idea behind not publishing being that if someone tries to reproduce your work, it's best to make certain the won't reproduce your coding bugs by copying (and also that publishing crap code is embarrassing)...
- rayiner 14y ago
  I disagree. Excel has several features that make it easier to review: 1) You can generally count on built-in formulas to be correct, which might have to be recreated in a different language; 2) Excel programs have a highly stylized control flow that's so simple that you don't even really have to explicitly consider it--you just look at the data flow and assume the engine gets the control flow right; 3) Excel has built in visual aids to help you catch off-by-one errors and the like, as well as charting capabilities to help you see if intermediate variables are behaving the way they ought to behave. And have you ever seen say a Matlab script written by a researcher? Researchers outside CS (and many researchers inside CS) write terrible code, because that's not their job. I'd much rather debug an Excel file written by an economist than a Matlab program.
  - enjo 14y ago
    You can generally count on built-in formulas to be correct, which might have to be recreated in a different language;* At one point, at least, this wasn't true. At Quickoffice we ran into all sorts of problems implementing functions as our results didn't match what Excel would display. It was fascinating. Ours were mathematically correct, but "Excel correct" is what our users wanted. Most of the errors where inherited from very early versions of Excel. Instead of fixing the formula, they would just replicate the bug to keep everything consistent. I'm straining to remember the specific examples (there were many), but it's been quite a few years since I was around that stuff.
    - brodney 14y ago
      Those stories always make for a good read. I'm interested in examples if you can think of any.
    - pseut 14y ago
      Some examples here for Excel 2007: http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2007/10/02/excel-2007-bug-shows-wrong-answers-to-simple-multiplications/ http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2007/10/02/excel-2007-bug-shows-w... one example from the post: 425 * 154.2 was displayed as 100,000 and treated as 100000 for some calculations but not others. I remember older versions of Excel having similar (but not exactly the same) problems in basic mathematical operations too, but can't remember exactly what they were.
minimax 14y ago
It's good for doing one-time analyses, but hard to automate when you have many inputs that are updated as time passes, or if you need to feed the output of one spreadsheet into another. Tangentially related: I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables. I think the analogues might have some pedagogical value.
- 1337biz 14y ago
  * They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables.* You are very optimistic here... Very optimistic. My guess is that 90% of excel users are at a maximum using the sorting button.
  - gknoy 14y ago
    Also, many 2d arrays of cells which represent data, and progressive calculations. And table lookups. This is, understandably, fun to debug.
- shrikant 14y ago
  > I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables. A not-insignificant part of my previous job was training Excel users to use non-Excel reporting and analysis tools. I believe I can say honestly say that 100% of them had no idea of arrays or variables, and only about a third of them even used the built-in Excel functions.
  - minimax 14y ago
    But could you explain variables and arrays in terms of spreadsheet cells and rows (or columns)? That is what I was thinking would be useful.
- chernevik 14y ago
  I teach a short session on moving analysis from Excel to SQL. Many power Excel users make the jump pretty smoothly. Once you get them thinking about a work flow moving from one table to another, they get it. But we're talking here about some very bright people accustomed basically hacking the one thing they know to get results. It's a subset of "Excel users" generally.

tptacek 14y ago

If you really don't believe Excel is safe for real analysis, you have much bigger things to be scared about than academic journals.

gohrt 14y ago
Such as the worldwide financial system.