How can anyone know whether Excel is giving the right answer to anything that is more complex that one can do in one’s own head? I mean if I had to check every formula and function, I don’t need Excel, but couldn’t there be a bug that someone missed that returns an erroneous result in specific situations? That could be potentially catastrophic depending on what the data and results were used for.
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People checked and we know Excel doesn’t always give the right answer.
For example Excel wrong believes that the year 1900 was a leap year.
So if you calculate how many days ago a date before march 1900 was you get the wrong answer. However this bug has been known about for so long that people have built their data and macros to work around it and Microsoft fixing it now would break all that stuff.
Also while not actually wrong, Excel has a nasty habit of assuming any given input that looks remotely like a date is meant to be a date.
If you put things in manually you notice that easily, but if you use excel to process data from another source automatically, It will end up corrupting your data.
There have actually been names for genese that scientist simply renamed rather than dealing with the common occurrence of Excel messing things up.
There have been lots of cases where people have been using Excel to process data and messed things up, but that is mostly user error than Excel itself.
For example during the height of the COVID pandemic the English health service processed COVID test results by importing CSV files into excel and hitting the limit of the maximum number of row excel can have, cutting of tens of thousands of test results from being processes.
Generally a big problem is that Excel is a spreadsheet software but people keep insisting on using it as a database or something it is even less suited for.
However by and large if used correctly and while staying aware of the programs limitations you get the right results. Enough people are using it that any deep bug would have been found by now.
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