Why would we have to hold Excel to higher standards?

Now, that Excel stores binary floats, but tries to pretend to use decimal ones, that’s something I think we can blame it for.

From section 2 of https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf:

Some parentheses in Microsoft’s Excel 2000 spreadsheet possess uncanny powers: Values Excel 2000 Displays for Several Expressions

  Expression              1.23456789012345000E+00   <– Entered to help count digits
  V = 4/3  displays…      1.33333333333333000E+00   Does Excel carry 15 sig. dec.?
  W=V- 1                  3.33333333333333000E-01   Whence comes the 15th 3 ?
  X = W*3                 1.00000000000000000E+00   Where went all 15 of the 9s ?
  Y=X- 1                  0.00000000000000000E+00   They all went away !
  Z = Y*2^52              0.00000000000000000E+00   Really all gone.
  (4/3 - 1)*3 - 1         0.00000000000000000E+00   Yes, gone.
  ((4/3 - 1)*3 - 1)       -2.22044604925031000E-16  (But not ENTIRELY gone !)
  ((4/3 - 1)*3 - 1)*2^52  -1.00000000000000000E+00  Excel’s arithmetic is weird.

Because one of it’s main uses is for doing calculations with money?

I appreciate that comeback. Well played.