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Re: curve fitting -- Excel Accuracy

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg41242] Re: curve fitting -- Excel Accuracy
  • From: Bill Rowe <listuser at earthlink.net>
  • Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 03:21:45 -0400 (EDT)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

On 5/8/03 at 9:39 AM, post_a_reply at no_e-mail.com (Jerry W. Lewis)
wrote:

>McCullough, Knusel, etc, provide useful information about very real
>shortcomings in Excel, but they also overlook related things that
>Excel does well.

While this may appear to be biased due to the focus on shortcommings, I see it as a very valid reason to not use Excel for anything but the simplest computations that I can easily check. When a software package has the type of shortcommings found in Excel, I find it very difficult to trust it for anything I cannot easily check.

True, Mathematica is not bug free. But Mathematica offers sufficient resources that I can solve the problem in more than one way giving me a way to check it. Excel lacks this ability, offering no real ability to check beyond manually tracing through the computation.

Excel is simply poorly designed for scientific/engineering computations even though it is possible to do many such computations in Excel.


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