I can confirm this: I know several mechanical engineers that do mission critical-type systems (think "power plants"), and they routinely use Excel VBA for calculations.
> My fav was when ms announced they'd paid an academic to fix =rand(), ignoring all the others.
I am not sure what that means.
Excel keeps all the bugs for backwards compatibility. So the sheets made years ago still provide same results.
In few cases the depreciated some functions -> the old ones still work, but are relatively hidden and the users are encouraged to use the new ones.
They probably should do the same with the statistical functions that supposedly have problems due to rounding. But that cannot be fixed - precision is up to 15 digits.
Also if you wanted an article that talks on Excel precision, you can start with the wikipedia page:
Excel has many problems, but you linking to few website that supposedly prove that "Excel bad" - but at the same time - those exiles simply dont work, is somehow very funny.
