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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When I do a very complex spreadsheet, I include a “sanity check”. I take the answer that Excel gave me, and use it to calculate the same problem in a different way. Unless Excel were giving me very well engineered mistakes, it should show if there was an error. Every time I’ve done this, the only mistakes I’ve found were mine, not Excel’s.
A slightly amusing anecdote: Several years ago I was put on some new medication. I was doing a spreadsheet on some engineering calculations, and I did a sanity check. But the answers didn’t line up at all. In fact, they were off by a factor of 10^36 . That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I spent most of a day looking for my mistake, but couldn’t find it. Then I had a Eureka! moment. I realized that *my new medication was making me stupid*. (My neurologist had warned me this was possible.) I quit taking the new drug and the next day I quickly found my error.
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