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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Because pretty much every math problem can also be solved by hand. There are other ways to calculate the same formula and cross-check results to see that they’re consistent.
And while they’re developing the software they test those rigorously. Developers generally use testing suites to feed a bunch of inputs into a function, compare the outputs to the expected answers, and make sure they match up. Because this can be automated, it’s possible to test a function against a very large number of possible test cases. Every time someone makes a change to the function they run the tests again, and if they’ve introduced an error some of the tests will fail.
In the case of Excel, it’s also very popular software used by millions of people every day. If a bug does get through testing (and they do) it’ll quickly be found by someone using the software, and that person will report it, and Microsoft will (usually) fix it.
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