Charles D Hixson wrote:
>  I stopped using VBA after I caught it making arithmetic mistakes.  Not 
>  rounding errors, outright mistakes.  Now granted this was over 5 years 
>  ago now, and they MAY have improved things...but I wouldn't trust it 
>  any more.  I actually rewrote things to use Excel macros to avoid 
>  doing arithmetic in VBA.  I never did figure out under what 
>  circumstances it would do this, but ever since then I've had an 
>  extreme distrust of everything programmed in MSOffice.  I figure that 
>  Excel macros are probably safe...because there would be so many eyes 
>  looking at them.  But I'm not sure.  I never heard anyone else saying 
>  that they had caught VBA (actually basic for MSAccess2000) in an 
>  arithmetic error, but I definitely did.  The numbers were small enough 
>  that a third grader would have seen the error, and there wasn't 
>  ANYTHING subtle about the program.
Excel itself has a long and painful history of mathematical 
incorrectness. To be fair, some of it came from the need to be upward 
compatible from Lotus 1-2-3, which in turn needed to be upward 
compatible from VisiCalc. A simple example is the belief in Excel that 
1900 was a leap year. I'm not sure what Google query you can use to hunt 
down this stuff, but I would not make business decisions based on 
anything done with Excel. I use it as an X-Y plotter when I'm in a 
hurry, but when I actually care about the numbers, I do things in R.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.