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by Betelbuddy 120 days ago
To start, your calculations will be correct unlike with Excel

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/

1 comments

From your second link

> Therefore, the problem is not necessarily with Excel. Equally, the problem is not with the IEEE 754 standard either. It’s just the complex nature of the world of mathematics and computing that we live in.

The IEEE 754 standard covers decimal floating point arithmetic, too. Decimal floating point avoids issues like 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 not being equal to 0.3 despite usually being displayed as 0.3. Maybe it's reasonable to use that instead?

Some earlier spreadsheets such as Multiplan used it (but not in the IEEE variety) because it was all soft-float for most users anyway.

Excel the one who decided to use only 15 digits. It is an Excel problem...