On Nov 23, 2009, at 7:24 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:01 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net
> wrote:
It was a good read. We had a recent example submitted to r-help where
I had occasion to test their "solution 2" (use OO.org' Calc) and
found
it to be just as bad at curve fitting for a polynomial as had been
Excel. Take a look at the pdf attached to this r-help item:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-November/218005.html
Well, the OO.org guys are trying to make something compatible with a
piece of MS software, but maybe this is taking it too far.
I love the story that sections of Microsoft XML spec for Office says
things like "Do whatever Excel does", thus setting into stone the bugs
inherent in that package as an ISO standard...
Barry
Just to reinforce Baz' statement about OO.org, for those who have been
around here for a while, you may recall this discussion back in 2003:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2003-June/034565.html
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2003-June/034860.html
Nothing has changed since then in OO.org's Calc version 3.1.1, which
is the current release.
On OSX, I can add Numbers from Apple's iWork '09 the mix:
Formula: =4.145 * 100 + 0.5
Result: 415.000000000000000000000000000000
Formula: =0.5 - 0.4 - 0.1
Result: -0.000000000000000027755575615629
Formula: =(0.5 - 0.4 - 0.1)
Result: -0.000000000000000027755575615629
So FWIW, Apple has not made the same errors as MS and OO.org, at least
in this narrow example.
Also, here are two additional Excel resources:
David Heiser's page: http://www.daheiser.info/excel/frontpage.html
Patrick Burns' Spreadsheet Addition:
http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
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