Re: Tried and Tested????
The question marks are indeed apposite, I would only ask why there are so few. Excel is basically not tested as proven by abysmal implementation of statistical features. Despite repeated reports of the problems, Microsoft has done little or nothing to correct them. This raises the question of whether other aspects of the software are similarly afflicted.
If you need convincing, here are some article with in depth testing of Excel:
1. http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/RSS2002.pdf
2. Knüsel, L. (1998) On the accuracy of statistical distributions in Microsoft Excel 1997 Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 26 (3) 375-377
3. McCullough, B.D. & Wilson, B. (2002) On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2000 and Excel XP Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 40 (4) 713-721
4. Burns, P. (2009) Spreadsheet addiction Retrieved from http://www.burns-
stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet addiction.html, 21 June 2009
5. Goldwater, E. (2007) Using Excel for Statistical Data Analysis - Caveats Retrieved from http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/ evagold/excel.html 27 June 2009
6. McCullough, B.D. & Wilson, B. (2005) On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003 Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 49 (4) 1244-1252
7. Keeling, K.B. & Pavur, R.J. (2007) A comparative study of the reliability of nine statistical software packages Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 51 (8) 3811-3831
8. McCullough, B.D. & Heiser, D.A. (2008) On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007 Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 52 (10) 4570-4578
9. Yalta, A.T. (2008) On the accuracy of statistical distributions in Microsoft Excel 2007 Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 52 (10) 4579-4586
10. McCullough, B.D. (2008) Microsoft Excel's `Not The Wichmann-Hill' random number generators Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 52 (10) 4587-4593