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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The answer you are looking for is something called Unit Testing. The software engineers come up with a series of tests for the various calculations functions, and these tests will have known answers. If they input data, and the numbers don’t match the expected results, they know it is broken.
Math specifically has something called proofs, which is basically coming up with an alternate/opposite formula that proves the first one is correct, by working your way back to the original equation.
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