One trouble with Excel is that it does an awful lot of different things but doesn’t do them well. If you try do use it to do what Pandas does it is shocking how small of a data file will break it.

The idea of incremental calculation of formulas that don’t need to be put in a particular order is still genius but the grid is so Apple ][. Maybe the world doesn’t know it because it spurned XBRL but accounting is fundamentally hyper dimensional (sales of items > $100 in the afternoon on the third week of February in stores in neighborhoods that have > 20% black people broken down but department…) not 2-d or 3-d.

Having the wrong data structures is another form of “garbage in garbage out”. I have though many times about Excel-killers, trouble is they have to be something new, different and probably specialized, people know how to get answers with Excel even if they are wrong, plus Excel is bundled with the less offensive Word and Powerpoint so a lot of people are paying for it either way.

Personally I want a spreadsheet that does decimal math even if there is no hardware support except on mainframes: I think a lot of people see 0.1 + 0.2 |= 0.3 and decide computers aren’t for them.

Google sheets does do decimal math so I'm not sure what you mean

It doesn’t use ordinary floats?

Unless my test methodology was flawed:

Displays 0.3:

"=0.1+0.2"

Displays 3E+79:

"=(0.1+0.2)*1e80"

Try "=((0.1+0.2)-0.3)*1e80" -- your test can be fooled by pretty standard rounding for display.

Oops -- nice, thank you! Sorry, guess I was mistaken

That could be just the way it's displaying, e.g. to 14sf or something. If you try adding a million 0.1s and use a formula to compare to 100,000, that might tell you (with floats I got 100000.00000133288).

This question suggests it uses floats: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74542790/google-sheet-yi...

maybe try rowzero.io as at least a remotely calculated alternative?

I live in excel sadly and it's all been downhill since excel 2003

as for better math calcs, yeah excel isn't perfect for true accuracy of decimal math but that rarely matters in 99.99% of use cases - if you need really accurate math you use R/Python/etc.

if you need something for the masses, visicalc/lotus/excel is the solution