[rubslopes]

I once read somewhere, maybe here: "If I were to choose a single software to use for the rest of my life, it'd be Excel". I agree with that.

[hulitu]

... until all your numbers become dates.

[dugmartin]

Or all your zip codes with leading zeros get silently truncated.

[disgruntledphd2]

Or until all your 16 digit IDs get truncated...

[aloisdg]

... or until all your molecules become dates.

[2Gkashmiri]

Why do I remember awk with that story?

[OGWhales]

Or your numbers are wrong because you didn't wrap in parentheses.

Example, put these two formulas in excel:

=(4/3 - 1)*3 - 1

=((4/3 - 1)*3 - 1)

[dns_snek]

The online version, at least, seems to be wrong when you do wrap it in parentheses:

=(4/3 - 1)*3 - 1 = 0

=((4/3 - 1)*3 - 1) = -2.22045E-16

[OGWhales]

Check out page 3-5 of this paper called How Futile are Mindless Assessments of Roundoff in Floating-Point Computation? [0]. It explains what is happening here better than I can and is where I got this example from.

[0]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf

[SantalBlush]

Or until your empty cells aren't truly empty, so you can't count the nonempty cells.

[hef19898]

That reminds of a jokester who replaced all empty cells in small spread sheet with a space. Good lick figuring out why your 5 row table all of a sudden was in the giga bytes of size (obvious exageration for dramatic reasons). Was a good practical joke so!

[diego_sandoval]

I would choose a web browser.

[MisterSandman]

Wouldn't python be a better answer, or is that cheating?

[arminiusreturns]

Emacs would be the real cheating answer.

[tmtvl]

Create a table in org mode, pass it to Common Lisp (or Perl or Scheme or R or whatever else floats your boat), and finally hand the thing over to graphviz for an in-line view of the results... and you can write up the relevant formulas with LaTeX.

[joeman1000]

Everything in Julia src-blocks please. Super comfy.

[ryzvonusef]

Is python really considered "software" in common parlance?

I think the comparable item would be something like VSCode.