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Excel and other spreadsheets suck at stats:

That is one camp of thought. There are others. Every package has it's limitations

* Burns, P. (2005). Spreadsheet Addiction.

Doesn't talk about never using statistics. Talks about misusing them by pressing them past their limits. "I know there are many spreadsheets in financial companies that take all night to compute. These are complicated and commonly fail. When such spreadsheets are replaced by code more suited to the task, it is not unusual for the computation time to be cut to a few minutes and the process much easier to understand."

* Cryer, J. (2001). Problems with using Microsoft Excel for StatisticsPDF.

Focuses on poor charting in the Excel 95 era. Title should be problems for using Excel for graphing. The article is a decade old. Excel has had several refreshes.

* Pottel, H. (n.d.). Statistical flaws in Excel. PDF

Another article about Excel 97 and 2000. Decade old software. Many flaws since addressed, and new flaws added. Clearly Excel bashing was popular around 2000.

* Practical Stats (n.d.), Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

This one suggests it's just fine for the submitter's purposes.

"Excel’s limitations, and its errors, make this a very questionable practice for scientific applications. For business applications where questions might be simpler and precision not as necessary, Excel may be just fine"

* Heiser, D. (2008). Errors, faults and fixes for Excel statistical functions and routines

For a more comprehensive and technical discussion, see the papers by Yu (2008); Yalta (2008); and McCullough & Heiser in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52(10).

Gets very technical, and I bet some of those remarks are valid, but if it's important you become aware of and work around the problem. If it's not, there is no problem. If you don't understand what you're asking Excel to calculate and why it might be wrong, it doesn't matter.

The more you go into this, the more it requires specialist training. The idea that just replacing one software package with flaws and features you don't understand with another geekier more difficult product with flaws and features you don't understand is ridiculous. As is moderation on slashdot. The comments are being moderated by monkeys practicing to type up Shakespeare..

Excel and other spreadsheets suck at stats:

* Burns, P. (2005). Spreadsheet Addiction.
* Cryer, J. (2001). Problems with using Microsoft Excel for StatisticsPDF.
* Pottel, H. (n.d.). Statistical flaws in Excel. PDF
* Practical Stats (n.d.), Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
* Heiser, D. (2008). Errors, faults and fixes for Excel statistical functions and routines

For a more comprehensive and technical discussion, see the papers by Yu (2008); Yalta (2008); and McCullough & Heiser in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52(10).

There's a whole array of vision problems out there. For instance this is how a person with keratoconus sees text on his/her pc. You can still function visually (with aids like zoom, increased contrast, etc.) but try figuring out a captcha with that vision.

It is no good idea to do statistics with Excel:

* Burns, P. (2005): Spreadsheet Addiction.

* Cryer, J. (2001): Problems with using Microsoft Excel for Statistics. (PDF)

* Pottel, H. (n.d.): Statistical flaws in Excel. (PDF)

* Practical Stats (n.d.): Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

* Heiser, D. (2008): Errors, faults and fixes for Excel statistical functions and routines

For a more comprehensive and technical discussion, see the papers by Yu (2008); Yalta (2008); and McCullough & Heiser in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52(10)

Here's a more detailed write up - I couldn't find the actual study itself: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/latestnewsandevents/a/5695

It might seem laughable on its face, but it's a controlled study and seems to indicate something counter-intuitive. Science is nice that way.

• Problems with Using Microsoft Excel for Statistics
• Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel
• Using Excel for Data Analysis
• Statistical Flaws in Excel
• On the Accuracy of Statistical Distributions in Microsoft Excel 97
• On the Reliability of Microsoft Excel XP for Statistical Purposes
• Use of Excel for Statistical Analysis
• Reliability of Statistical Procedures in Excel
• Association of Statistics Specialists Using Microsoft Excel
• Statistical Analysis Using Microsoft Excel

Read up, kid.

And you only need 4 opcodes! (add, branch, load, store)

Here's the link: Parapsychology