Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere

Re:Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere by mbetter on Friday February 15, 2013 @01:17AM (#5224766)

Your comment is just darling. "Given that perhaps 90% of Excel spreadsheets have errors ..." -- a completely made up statistic leads to -- "I fail to see that Excel is a good or useful tool." -- a conclusion that doesn't even follow from your made up evidence, even if it were true.

Nicholas Taleb would be rolling over in his grave, if he was dead.

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Re:Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere by giardini on Sunday February 17, 2013 @11:47AM (#5235704)

"darling"? "made up evidence"? Are you employed by Microsoft?

Others may have provided this URL: "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors" by Raymond R. Panko http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow.htm

The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group: http://www.eusprig.org/

Grammar correction: "if he was dead." <--- _were_ dead, _were_ dead!

Luckily he's very much alive. From Nicholas Taleb's website at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html

"My refutation of the VAR does not mean that I am against quantitative risk management - having spent all of my adult life as a quantitative trader, I learned the hard way the fails of such methods. I am simply against the application of unseasonned quantitative methods."

Use of a paradigm that has such a high error rate is, at the very least, an "unseasoned quantitative method".

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Re:Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere by mbetter on Thursday February 21, 2013 @03:22PM (#5260078)

"These error rates, although troubling, are in line with those in programming and other human cognitive domains."

I take it you are against software in general, then.

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