Excel Patch for Standard Deviation Bug

Just noticed a new update for the Mac version of Microsoft Office 2004 (11.3.3) - note that it's not yet showing up in the automatic update tool. One of the fixes included in the update is for:

an issue that causes standard deviation calculations to produce inaccurate results when the calculations are used in PivotTable reports.

For those of you running Macs (and there's a few, judging by our logs), and using StDev in your pivot tables (or use a tool that does), get on updating.

It does make you think - reliance on any one tool always exposes us to the risk that bugs or kludges in implementation will give us incorrect results, and particularly so with Excel given its ubiquity. I couldn't find any more details on the bug in my quick hunt on Microsoft's site, or a Google search, but did turn up these papers critiquing Excel 97's implementation of a number of statistical functions (referred to and addressed by Microsoft in this KnowledgeBase article):

• Knusel, L. On the Accuracy of Statistical Distributions in Microsoft Excel 97, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 26, 375-377, 1998.

• McCullough, B.D. & B. Wilson, On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 97, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 31, 27-37, 1999.

For those of you interested in the use of spreadsheets (in general, not just Excel) and the associated risks, check out the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group's site.