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I think that in jobs where statistics is the main function of the job, you will often not find them using Excel. The business intelligence folks at my company u
by christopheraden 13y ago
I think that in jobs where statistics is the main function of the job, you will often not find them using Excel. The business intelligence folks at my company use it for cursory analyses, but I often question the rigor involved in their practices, and using Excel to do statistics is icing on the cake. I would trust the results of SAS or R or, hell, even Minitab, over the results I get out of Excel. Microsoft seems more content making their product shinier than improving the underlying numerical accuracy of their methods.
The sooner people realize it's not designed for real statistics, the sooner people can stop hearing statisticians rant when they receive "Report_Analysis_Feb1-2012_Update_Final-v3.xlsx".
- stdbrouw 13y agoIf it's not designed for real statistics, what is it designed for then, fake statistics? I see what you're saying, but I think the real distinction you're drawing is between heavy-duty work and run-off-the-mill descriptive stats. Even the latter need to be accurate.
- christopheraden 13y agoThanks for pointing out the distinction. You're right that this is what I was going for, but the articles I've seen thus far about the inaccuracies in Excel deal mainly with the poor capabilities of the optimization routines, RNG, and distribution functions. If you're balancing a budget with numbers that involve 2 decimals or taking measures of central tendency on similarly-scaled values, Excel isn't woefully inadequate.
- stdbrouw 13y agoThat makes sense. Apologies if I was being flippant.