And these are corroborated by who ? Which version is involved and what level of arithmetic.? Has the allegedly faulty version been upgraded since the fault was reported ? Has it ever been reported ?There is some correspondence on EDLUG suggesting that the statistical functions in Excel are flawed. The commentator wondered how many corporations are going to find there projections do not work!
I seem to be becoming a Microsoft apologist which is not a position I choose to have but I do find it vaguely annoying when people come up with unsupported statements because they fit their arguments. There was a similar story going around about the Pentium 1 processor's maths ability which caused great jollity amongst the Intel hating farternity (sic) but, in reality affected a very small number of calculations and was easily fixed. It was, nevertheless, heralded as a major problem at the time. I doubt if any company would use an Excel spreadsheet for anything really important or complex mathematically and, since I use them all day at work for many different forms of calculation and have never found an error I would say that it is unlikely that it is important.
I never said it was.
Price is no indication of reliability or quality in software as in any other human activity!
The trouble here is that people like to take pot shots at their favourite targets and M$ is every computer users favourite. I find some of their software exasperating and deeply annoying in the way that it works. I also marvel at the things it leaves out. However some of it works well and it does improve as it goes along. I did use Open Office once and hated it. I found the user interface face very clunky, it tried to take over the entire front end of the machine and it was not easy to exchange information with a M$ user and maintain the format. This was a couple of years ago and it may well have improved. I get all the M$ software on the action pack licence so for me it is cheap. It does what I want the PC to do.
-- Roy Wood Q Branch. 20 Locks Hill, Portslade, Sussex. Tel: +44 (0) 1273 386030 fax: +44 (0) 1273 430501 web : www.qbranch.demon.co.uk
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