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.