Re:Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
by throw_away_777 on Saturday August 27, 2016 @11:13PM
(#12375144)
You can verify it sure, but it is much harder to verify excel equations than code. There is no github for Excel (besides saving with different names). You generally don't see the equations when you look at Excel - this is one of the reasons Excel is so error prone.
Re:Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
by shostack on Saturday August 27, 2016 @11:31PM
(#12375186)
Fully agree. My point was that it can indeed be verified though in many circumstances.
That said, I think there's always a balance between a quick down and dirty business solution that gets the job done, vs. something fully engineered. Additionally, it is much easier for business users to shoulder more of the workload while letting people with programming knowledge focus on other tasks.
Is there a use case where you think this wouldn't be possible?