R help - Jun 2010 - [OT] Oo-calc & StAtistics

The thread "R licensing query" currently running has raised
the classic critcisms of using Excel for statistics.

I was wondering: Has anyone applied the same or similar set
of tests to OpenOffice "calc"?

Or would the Executive Summary be: "Calc is just like Excel"?

(Not that I'm a spreadsheet user, if I can avoid it; but I
sometimes get asked about such things).

Sorry to be completely non-R here, but I can't think of a
better place to ask!

Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 17-Jun-10                                       Time: 21:03:51
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On Jun 17, 2010, at 3:03 PM, Ted Harding wrote:
> The thread "R licensing query" currently running has raised
> the classic critcisms of using Excel for statistics.
> 
> I was wondering: Has anyone applied the same or similar set
> of tests to OpenOffice "calc"?
> 
> Or would the Executive Summary be: "Calc is just like Excel"?
> 
> (Not that I'm a spreadsheet user, if I can avoid it; but I
> sometimes get asked about such things).
> 
> Sorry to be completely non-R here, but I can't think of a
> better place to ask!
> 
> Ted.

Ted,

The most recent work on this that I know of, that includes Calc, is:

On the Numerical Accuracy of Spreadsheets
Marcelo G. Almiron, Bruno Lopes, Alyson L. C. Oliveira, Antonio C. Medeiros,
Alejandro C. Frery
JSS
Vol. 34, Issue 4, Apr 2010
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v34/i04


There have been some discussions on R-Help in the past (circa 2003), which I
have participated in, which discuss some of the faults in Calc, such as rounding
numbers "close to 0" to 0 (like Excel does) and some of the non-IEEE
754 floating point behavior (like Excel does)...

HTH,

Marc Schwartz