Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper

Re:Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper by smt88 on Sunday February 11, 2024 @03:11PM (#39338192)

I don't use autofill precisely because I have no insight into the algorithm behind it. I suspect it's very "stupid," but I don't know exactly how stupid it is.

It sounds like he didn't realize or notice that autofill was using adjacent cells (from other countries, in this instance). That behavior would shock me as well. I thought autofill only took columns of data into account.

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Re:Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper by kgwgk on Monday February 12, 2024 @01:46AM (#39342199)

> It sounds like he didn't realize or notice that autofill was using adjacent cells (from other countries, in this instance).

No, it doesn’t sound like that: “in several instances where there were no observations to use for the autofill operation, the professor had taken the values from an adjacent country in the spreadsheet.”

It was not Excel’s fault.

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