Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It’s solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There’s a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can’t remember how it goes.
Just look what they’re doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM… Kill all your main characters.
It’s about time all those math types learned to relax a bit. These numbers in these spreadsheets don’t need to be exact all the time. It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is. Error bars are there for a reason people!
It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is.
Just like the Xerox copier/scanners that helpfully kept scanned images small by reusing parts of the image elsewhere. Like, all these 6s on your scanned invoices can totally be replaced with 8s. There’s just a tiny degradation in the overall image, it shouldn’t be a problem!
Xerox should have just called it AI compression and people would have been throwing money at them.
Vibe accounting
I mean, it’s on brand with everything else these days: https://www.newsweek.com/how-much-trump-worth-depends-how-he-feels-384720
“Please calculate the totals to reflect a favourable result”
Sounds like what accountants do already
Accountants tally the numbers and hand you the totals. Twisting them is unethical and can lead to them losing their licenses.
Analysts manipulate the numbers to push a message. No ethics allowed.
Signed, an analyst raised by an accountant. Interacting with other analysts is infuriating.
It’s all about whether your accounts give a vibe of truthiness. Auditors need to chill.
Trillions of dollars to develop a calculator that’s wrong sometimes.
I mean, most calculators are wrong quite often
No, the user is wrong quite often, the calculator gives the answer to the question asked, not the answer to the question the user wanted to ask.
Garbage in, garbage out.
I’ve never seen a calculator being wrong, and I’m genuinely curious what you’re talking about.
That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.
Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.
If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.
Only when people use the wrong input, garbage in and garbage out.
In the same vein I can’t think of any instance where excel had calculated things wrong unless there was a fault in the formula that I made.
this one is just wrongerer
0% of the time it works because I shut that shit off the first minute I saw it
$20 of the time
Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why ‘copilot in excel’ (not agent mode) wasn’t designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn’t designed for it.
Everyone else who’s anti-AI:
- What is that smell? It smells like a used diaper filled with Indian food!
- What is that?! It smells like a turd covered in burnt hair!
- It smells like Bigfoot’s dick!
- What is that stench?! It smells like the inside of a fake leg!
ITT: people who haven’t seen the movie, I guess.
Damn thats high!/s
