On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2010

Guy Mélard ()

Computational Statistics, 2014, vol. 29, issue 5, 1095-1128

Abstract: All previous versions of Microsoft Excel until Excel 2007 have been criticized by statisticians for several reasons, including the accuracy of statistical functions, the properties of the random number generator, the quality of statistical add-ins, the weakness of the Solver for nonlinear regression, and the data graphical representation. Until recently Microsoft did not make an attempt to fix all the errors in Excel and was still marketing a product that contained known errors. We provide an update of these studies given the recent release of Excel 2010 and we have added OpenOffice.org Calc 3.3 and Gnumeric 1.10.16 to the analysis, for the purpose of comparison. The conclusion is that the stream of papers, mainly in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, has started to pay off: Microsoft has partially improved the statistical aspects of Excel, essentially the statistical functions and the random number generator. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Statistical function; Random number generator; Nonlinear regression; OpenOffice.org Calc 3.3; Gnumeric (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1007/s00180-014-0482-5

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