Hi guys; FWIW, while I was playing with the new random number generator I went around looking for some references and I found this paper from the Journal of Statistical Software (2010) titled "On the Numerical Accuracy of Spreadsheets":
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v34/i04/paper It basically shows that Calc, among other Spreadsheet programs, is not really well suited for statistical analysis. Something rather amazing is that the major statistic suites have been moving towards a more "spreadsheet-like" environment. I am personally a fan of Minitab as it brings many functions that I needed for Quality control in a previous job. The price of the software package sky-rocketed in few years though :(. One approach could be improving our local functions to match more demanding specifications: some of that will necessarily have to be done. Another approach could be facilitating interactions with software like R, and I am aware that approach has many followers. A third approach, which I would like to suggest as a future project, would be developing a scaddin focused on statistics and making full use of the functions from boost that we already have available as a module but we are not using to their full extent. I know we are all busy with other stuff to improve for 4.0 Release, just thought I'd leave the idea for the future. cheers, Pedro.
