Help with EXCEL

[Tim Streater]

Excel is fine for small things, SWMBO uses it for the accounts for the Village Hall and a couple of other entities. You can get the spreadsheet to tell you when the accounts don't balance, f'instance. But much larger and I woul dhave thought it starts to become opaque.

If you mean a 360/75, then I expect it would have had double-precision (64-bit) floating point back then. Certainly the Sigma-7 I was using in the

70s had it. I wrote a histogram package at that point, in assembler, and initially used 32-bit floating point. Testing quickly showed that this gave occasional errors, so I switched all the single-precision opcodes to their double-precision counterparts and had no more trouble.

[Bob Eager]

At some point they included decimal instructions where results could be up to 31 digits.

[Tim Streater]

That was an option, yes, but we didn't purchase it.

[Paul]

I would say "yes", except I've noted in the past how careless the staff are at LO. (Output print quality was my beef with them. They did several stupid things that defied belief.)

I would hope the person doing the engine calcs, would have at least tested the results were the same. There would not be much point in being "Excel file compatible", if your output was not compatible.

It takes people stepping in pooh like this, to build trust in a tool. Having two digits after the decimal as a display default, really is a bad idea.

Paul

[Peter Able]

A rounding of 25p divided by 15 implies a time rounding of 1 minute. Ergo you are rounding the time to the nearest minute.

Use formatting to show a prettier result, but don't round the computations until the final result.

PA