[R] Rounding problem R vs Excel

[Juan Carlos Correa Morales]

Hi: Below you find two articles about Excel.

Knusel, L. (1998) On the Accuracy of Statistical Distributions in
Microsoft Excel 97. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. Vol. 26, No.
3, pp. 375-377

McCullough, B.D. y Wilson, D. (1999) On the Accuracy of Statistical
Procedures in Microsoft Excel 97. Computational Statistics & Data
Analysis. Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 27-37



On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Paul, David  A wrote:

> I don't have the reference, but a biologist friend of mine
> once showed me a refereed journal article that purported
> to demonstrate numerical errors made by MSExcel.  This
> would have been Excel97 or Excel2000... In any case, the
> journal's scope was biological in nature and the article
> was of interest since Excel is heavily used in that community.
>
> -david paul
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:dmurdoch at pair.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 8:34 AM
> To: MSchwartz at medanalytics.com
> Cc: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Rounding problem R vs Excel
>
>
> On 04 Jun 2003 00:24:08 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >Excel 2002 (XP):
> >
> >Cell Formula          Value
> >= 0.5 - 0.4 - 0.1     0.00000000000000000000E+00
> >=(0.5 - 0.4 - 0.1)    -2.77555756156289000000E-17
>  ...
> >What is interesting is the change in the displayed value in Excel when
> >the second formula is surrounded by parens (which I found purely by
> >accident). This would suggest that there may be something going on in
> >the parsing of the cell formula that affects the calculation and
> >displayed value.
>
> "Interesting"?  I'd say "horrifying".  When (expr) does not evaluate the
> same as expr, what can you trust?
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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