Trusting Excel

[less42]

I've been having an on-going debate with several of my co-workers about "trusting" Excel. She always double checks the figures in Excel for fear that they are not adding correctly and doesn't use Excel templates or formulas.

Is there any merit to this?

 

[doco]

P.S. - Sliderules??? You trust those things?

Have you actually seen one? I am aging myself a bit but they were common as pencil and paper when I was in high school and college.

The closest thing to an adding machine was a huge Burroughs machine with (seemingly) a zillion keys and a large handle to pull when you needed to make calculation and print. Not much more than Babbage's original Difference Engine

 

[help_questions]

tell your co-woeker to stop using excel and buy a ledger if she dont trust excel....

honestly....it depends on her situation...if she doesnt trust templates/formulas that were created by others, then i understand, as i wouldnt want to make conclusions or present facts based on another's error.......but if she created it, then she should trust it...unless she had a 0% attention to detail.....MS would not release a program that could do baciscs

 

[Scott820]

People and excel dont always mix.

people who like numbers and systems and boundries like the world they create in excel.

People who think about hills, and flowers, and clouds, dont tend to like other peoples spreadsheets becuase they are not in control. The reality is they are not capable of building up a spreadsheet they could trust themselves, so have a hard time using something out of their control... My experience anyways...

I use excel all the time, but it is easy to make simple mistakes, then carry them through only to realise later, DOH! (just earlier i was doing a cumalitive summation, and forgot to dollar/anchor up part of the array, and the result was very confusing till i saw the error).