Re: Sarah Palin - hot or not?

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:36:06 -0700 (PDT), Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 9 Sep 2008 13:56:51 -0700 (PDT), Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 5 Sep 2008 08:06:55 -0700 (PDT), mpm <mpmillard@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

I think you would find Excel invaluable as a scratchpad for some
things. It is a lot faster for tabulating and graphing modest amounts
of data. And despite the default marketting oriented graphs (XL2007 XY
graph styles now look like they were drawn by a short sighted 3 year
old with a thick wax crayon) they can be coaxed into a form suitable
for publication in journals.

Sigmaplot or IDL(expensive if you don't qualify for an academic
licence) do a better job if you have a lot of data.
Excel is good when I need a marketing type to, say, graph sales of
some product over time, and do a 2nd order curve-fit on the data, when
said marketing type doesn't actually understand what a 2nd order fit
means. It makes computers useful to people who can't program. *IF* you
sanity check their results.
Excel is better than that - it isn't perfect though.

Don't ask them to do a third order fit in XL2007! The numerical
algorithm in the graph fitting routine has been compromised (now it is
just as bad as LINEST). Previous versions of Excel 2003 and earlier
had a regularised polynomial fit. That is they fit a set of N
orthogonal polynomials to determine the coefficients for x^N very
accurately.

Somehow you are not selling me on the wonder of Excel.

It holds for any spread*** program, because of the differences in
the way algorithms are programmed in them.

I am not trying to sell you on Excel. I am telling it like it is. If
you want to use Excel for science and engineering it will work well
enough for moderate amounts of data. That is XL2002 and XL2003 will.

Unfortunately some of my customers insist on the latest and greatest
XL2007 which in addition to being horribly slow and unstable has
various major faults in the VBA filedirectory implementation see for
example:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920229/en-us

Those short words "Run-time error 5111 The command is not available on
this platform" hide a deep and festering sore inside MS development.
Searching for files in a directory is a pretty basic thing to want to
do and the horrible *BODGED* workaround using FileSystemObject is ugly
as hell.

Vista developers blame the XL2007 coders and vice versa. And despite
the fact that I think Vista is a slow messy resource hog I reckon
XL2007 is an order of magnitude worse. My money is on the XL2007 team
having screwed up.

OOTB Excel 2007 without SP1 applied is barely usable. Caveat Emptor.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Up to XL 2000 it was pretty useful, 2003 is really flaky and i hear (i
have not tried it) 2007 is total garbage (for power users and many
other experienced users).

.

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