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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).

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)

If someone utilizes Excel to its full "potential," they're probably producing absolute garbage:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf
http://www.daheiser.info/excel/frontpage.html

Parent is right: money is not the argument, that is worth the switch. Software companies, Microsoft included want students to learn MS Office, Adobe, Matlab, Autodesk Inventor, etc. Some companies even give their student versions of really expensive software packages away for free, just have a look at Autodesk.

For the students it is of great value, if they are able to work efficiently with open source software. Just a few days ago I helped someone to switch from Endnote to Zotero+Jabref. It was quite a pain to convert from the Endnote format to something more open like the Bibtex format and there are several websites which show you 10 different hacks how to do it somehow.

With open source the file format is always documented, at least in the code itself. So if you want to work with your reference in 5 years without upgrading Endnote to Windows 8 this is the only sane choice.

For science in general it is necessary to check your results carefully and be able to reproduce other people's work somehow. How are you going to judge a paper claiming: "We simulated bla with this $$$ software package and it looks marvelous"?

Besides file formats and reproducibility in my opinion it is in most cases better to teach something that can be useful for the next 5-20 years, instead of some fast moving target. Software vendors often change their products and break backwards compatibility (Labview is great, but going back 2 versions is a no go) not because they invented this new must have feature but to sell the next version. If your students can do statistical analysis in Gnumeric and R they are well equipped for advanced work and do not have to worry about all the errors in Excel (statistics in Excel).

Excel by itsel really is nothing special.

- Microsoft didn't invent the concept (visi corp did, with VisiCalc)
- Excel is full of bugs that have never been fixed.
- Excel is adequate software for doing some simple-minded accounting, printing some somewhat pretty graphics and producing some extremely simple applications with the help of an intern or two, all in a neat package for not that much money.

It should never ever be used in the following situations :

- in lieu of even a simple database
- for doing proper accounting
- for running ever so slightly complex simulation
- for crunching real numbers that have meaning and significance.
- especially, NEVER, EVER for statistics.

I wouldn't touch numbers coming out of Excel with a 10-foot pole. From personal experience, due to the fact that Excel users in 99.5% of the cases are people simply clueless with data.

Moreover Excel's features (and bugs) have been duplicated in Gnumeric, Openoffice, Siag and whatnot for a very long time.

The only reason Excel is in use everywhere even in situation where it shouldn't is simply due to Microsoft bundling it in office. In my experience people require a word processor first, purchase Office to get Word and then often use Excel because it's there.

On another note, you might not want to do too much statistical analysis in MS Excel. (Maybe not in OOo calc either) http://www.practicalstats.com/Pages/excelstats.htm l/ http://www.csdassn.org/software_reports/gnumeric.p df/ http://www.daheiser.info/excel/frontpage.html/