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Statistics and Excel 2007
The June issue of the journal Computational Statistics and Data Anaylsis has published a collection of five articles on Microsoft Excel 2007. In the past, the journal has published articles critical of the accuracy of prior versions of Excel. Immediately below is a quote From the introduction to the special section, followed by the titles, authors and abstracts of the five articles. Over the years, this journal has published many articles describing the errors in Microsoft Excel, errors that raise concerns about Microsoft's quality assurance procedures, at least insofar as Excel is concerned. Hence it is perhaps worth comparing quality assurance in Microsoft's Excel to quality assurance in its game division. A recent issue of Wired magazine (Thompson, 2007) describes the way that "Bungie", a Microsoft gaming subsidiary, tests one of its products, a game called Halo3: "Because it [Bungie] is owned by Microsoft, which launches dozens XBox and PC games every year, Bungie has access to one of the most advanced game-testing facilities ever built. [Bungie has] now analyzed more than 3000 hours of Halo3 played by some 600 everyday gamers, tracking everything from favored weapons to how and where - down to the square foot - players most frequently get killed. "Bungie doesn't just test its own games this way. It also buys copies of rival titles and studies those, too, to see how Halo3 matches up." "It is difficult not to think that if Microsoft tested business software the way it tested game software, then the statistical functions in Excel would be as accurate as those found in any other major software package. If that were the case, then none of the articles in this special section would have been written." (1) "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007" B.D. McCullough, David A. Heiser Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52 (10), 4570-4578 abstract Excel 2007, like its predecessors, fails a standard set of intermediate-level accuracy tests in three areas: statistical distributions, random number generation, and estimation. Additional errors in specific Excel procedures are discussed. Microsoft's continuing inability to correctly fix errors is discussed. No statistical procedure in Excel should be used until Microsoft documents that the procedure is correct; it is not safe to assume that Microsoft Excel's statistical procedures give the correct answer. Persons who wish to conduct statistical analyses should use some other package. (2) "The accuracy of statistical distributions in microsoft excel 2007" A. Talha Yalta Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52 (10), 4579-4586 abstract We provide an assessment of the statistical distributions in Microsoft® Excel versions 97 through 2007 along with two competing spreadsheet programs, namely Gnumeric 1.7.11 and OpenOffice.org Calc 2.3.0. We find that the accuracy of various statistical functions in Excel 2007 range from unacceptably bad to acceptable but significantly inferior in comparison to alternative implementations. In particular, for the binomial, Poisson, inverse standard normal, inverse beta, inverse student’s t, and inverse F distributions, it is possible to obtain results with zero accurate digits as shown with numerical examples. (3) "Microsoft Excel's `Not The Wichmann-Hill' random number generators" B.D. McCullough Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52 (10), 4587-4593 abstract Microsoft attempted to implement the Wichmann-Hill RNG in Excel 2003 and failed; it did not just produce numbers between zero and unity, it would also produce negative numbers. Microsoft issued a patch that allegedly fixed the problem so that the patched Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 now implement the Wichmann-Hill RNG, as least according to Microsoft. We show that whatever RNG it is that Microsoft has implemented in these versions of Excel, it is not the Wichmann- Hill RNG. Microsoft has now failed twice to implement the dozen lines of code that define the Wichmann-Hill RNG. (4) "It's easy to produce chartjunk using microsoft excel 2007 but hard to make good graphs" Yu-Sung Su Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52 (10), 4594-4601 abstract The purpose of default settings in a graphic tool is to make it easy to produce good graphics that accord with the principles of statistical graphics. If the defaults do not embody these principles, then the only way to produce good graphics is to be sufficiently familiar with the principles of statistical graphics. This paper shows that Excel graphics defaults do not embody the appropriate principles. Users who want to use Excel are advised to know the principles of good graphics well enough so that they can choose the appropriate options to override the defaults. Microsoft® should overhaul the Excel graphics engine so that its defaults embody the principles of statistical graphics and make it easy for non-experts to produce good graphs. (5) "Teaching statistics with excel 2007 and other spreadsheets." John Nash Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52 (10), 4602-4606 abstract This article considers which activities in teaching statistics may be suitable candidates for the application of spreadsheets, and whether spreadsheets in general and Excel 2007 in particular are suitable for these tasks. |
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