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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Spreadsheets | 293 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
No, no, no
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 18 2013 @ 03:11 PM EDT
You don't understand. This is a messenger bashing exercise
and Excel was closest, it gets the blame.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Or even....
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 18 2013 @ 03:31 PM EDT

... pencil and paper...

... calculator ...

Human math errors that were not validated is the bottom line in this case....

.... even if I would dearly love to see an actual Excel bug (like 1900 = leap year) be the cause of a massive calculation error, it's not the case in this instance.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Spreadsheets
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 18 2013 @ 05:58 PM EDT
The problem as I see it is that because the spreadsheet does the math we assume
that it must be correct. At least close because it was done by a computer. The
spreadsheet hides the formulai used for the calculation so errors are not
noticed unless they are glaring or you go hunting for them. The error mentioned
was quite probably caused by adding additional rows to the spreadsheet without
fixing the formula. The totals still showed up so the formula must be working,
right?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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