On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2010

All previous versions of Microsoft Excel until Excel 2007 have been criticized by statisticians for several reasons, including the accuracy of statistical functions, the properties of the random number generator, the quality of statistical add-ins, the weakness of the Solver for nonlinear regression, and the data graphical representation. Until recently Microsoft did not make an attempt to fix all the errors in Excel and was still marketing a product that contained known errors. We provide an update of these studies given the recent release of Excel 2010 and we have added OpenOffice.org Calc 3.3 and Gnumeric 1.10.16 to the analysis, for the purpose of comparison. The conclusion is that the stream of papers, mainly in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, has started to pay off: Microsoft has partially improved the statistical aspects of Excel, essentially the statistical functions and the random number generator.

[1]  William S. Cleveland.  The elements of graphing data , 1980 .

[2]  Charles G. Renfro,et al.  Some numerical aspects of nonlinear estimation , 2000 .

[3]  Chandler Stolp,et al.  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , 1983 .

[4]  Bruce D. McCullough,et al.  Assessing the Reliability of Statistical Software: Part I , 1998 .

[5]  Yu-Sung Su,et al.  Computational Statistics and Data Analysis It's Easy to Produce Chartjunk Using Microsoft Excel 2007 but Hard to Make Good Graphs , 2022 .

[6]  B. D. McCullough,et al.  On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003 , 1999 .

[7]  Thomas P. McWilliams,et al.  Polynomial Trendline function flaws in Microsoft Excel , 2010, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[8]  Roger L. Berger.  Nonstandard operator precedence in Excel , 2007, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[9]  David A. Heiser,et al.  On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007 , 1999, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[10]  Bruce D. McCullough,et al.  Spreadsheets in the Cloud - Not Ready Yet , 2013 .

[11]  Leonidas J. Guibas,et al.  Periods in Strings , 1981, J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A.

[12]  A. Talha Yalta,et al.  Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research? , 2010 .

[13]  John Walkenbach.  Excel 2007 Charts , 2008 .

[14]  Leon S. Lasdon,et al.  Design and Testing of a Generalized Reduced Gradient Code for Nonlinear Programming , 1978, TOMS.

[15]  Leon S. Lasdon,et al.  Design and Use of the Microsoft Excel Solver , 1998, Interfaces.

[16]  Micah Altman,et al.  Numerical Issues in Statistical Computing for the Social Scientist , 2003 .

[17]  A. Talha Yalta,et al.  The accuracy of statistical distributions in Microsoft® Excel 2007 , 2008, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[18]  Wayne H. Enright,et al.  Robust and reliable defect control for Runge-Kutta methods , 2007, TOMS.

[19]  Alejandro C. Frery,et al.  On the Numerical Accuracy of Spreadsheets , 2010 .

[20]  Bruce D. McCullough,et al.  On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2000 and Excel XP , 2002 .

[21]  David H. Bailey,et al.  A Portable High Performance Multiprecision Package , 2010 .

[22]  Leo Kn usel.  On the accuracy of statistical distributions in Microsoft Excel 2003 , 1998 .

[23]  Pierre L'Ecuyer,et al.  TestU01: A C library for empirical testing of random number generators , 2006, TOMS.

[24]  Micah Altman,et al.  Some Details of Nonlinear Estimation , 2004 .

[25]  Thomas C. Herndon,et al.  Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff , 2014 .

[26]  B. D. McCullough.  The accurary of , 2000 .

[27]  B. D. McCullough,et al.  Special section on Microsoft Excel 2007 , 2008, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[28]  John C. Nash,et al.  Teaching statistics with Excel 2007 and other spreadsheets , 2008, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[29]  Takuji Nishimura,et al.  Mersenne twister: a 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform pseudo-random number generator , 1998, TOMC.

[30]  Bruce D. McCullough,et al.  Wilkinson's Tests and Econometric Software , 1999 .

[31]  Peter J. Diggle,et al.  Lgcp: Inference with spatial and spatio-temporal log-gaussian cox processes in R , 2013 .

[32]  Günther Sawitzki,et al.  Report on the numerical reliability of data analysis systems , 1994 .

[33]  Bruce D. McCullough,et al.  A review of TESTU01 , 2006 .

[34]  B. D. McCullough,et al.  The accurary of Mathematica 4 as a statistical package , 2000, Comput. Stat..

[35]  A. Talha Yalta,et al.  On the importance of verifying forecasting results , 2009 .

[36]  Christoph W. Ueberhuber.  Numerical computation : methods, software, and analysis , 1997 .

[37]  Kellie B. Keeling,et al.  Statistical Accuracy of Spreadsheet Software , 2011 .

[38]  R. Koenker.  Quantile Regression: Name Index , 2005 .

[39]  I. D. Hill,et al.  Correction: Algorithm AS 183: An Efficient and Portable Pseudo-Random Number Generator , 1982 .

[40]  Edward R. Tufte,et al.  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , 1986 .

[41]  Jonathan D. Cryer,et al.  Problems With Using Microsoft Excel for Statistics , 2001 .

[42]  G. T. Timmer,et al.  Stochastic global optimization methods part II: Multi level methods , 1987, Math. Program..

[43]  G. T. Timmer,et al.  Stochastic global optimization methods part I: Clustering methods , 1987, Math. Program..

[44]  B. D. McCullough,et al.  Microsoft Excel's 'Not The Wichmann-Hill' random number generators , 2008, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[45]  Kenneth S. Rogoff,et al.  Growth in a Time of Debt , 2010 .