Excel... or are you?

Today I had a long "discussion" with a guy at work about Excel.   You know... that little spreadsheet that is made that that little company in Seattle.  He is under the impression that all those calculations that the spreadsheet can do are not reliable.  

A little background:  this discussion is ongoing and began about a year ago when a specific spreadsheet was thrust on us.  He started by saying, "I've seen when .45 was rounded to .5 and when .45 was rounded to .4."  To him the discussion was now over and he proved his point that Excel was a poor program that can not do simple math functions.  I have tried and tried to explain the what you see in the cell is not always exactly what is there, and that you can show as many or as few places past the decimal as you want to and the .449 which can be displayed as .45 would round to .4 and .451 which can also be be displayed as .45 will round to .5.  Lets just say he didn't get it.

Conversations like this have happened many time since and all I can do is walk away shaking my head. Which brings me to today.  I went to discuss the spreadsheet with him again, and about halfway through the conversation I thought I was making headway... he was agreeing with me that Microsoft would not sell a program that did not work and that we needed to validate the spreadsheet, not the program.  I got excited and told him that I was done.  I thought great, now I can move on with my life and get out from under this project.  I handed him the 356 page report (for a three page spreadsheet) and he started to flip through it.  He saw one of my PostIt notes and that when he freaked.  " What are you trying to pull, you haven't done half of this.  Where are your calculation for this page or this one" as he flipped through the packet. "I hope you don't think this will get by me."  Just to clarify for all of my many readers, I left the verifications of the Excel functions blank.  As I tried to explain to him, as he just had said "Microsoft would not sell a program that did not work".  Have I mentioned yet he is the head of the IT Validation department.  The moral to the story is if you work for a company long enough, it doesn't matter what you don't know, you can still be a department manager.

Gotta go...I need to CALL Microsoft to see if the have PROOF that Excel can actually do the calculations they claim it can.  Sometime you just have to smile and nod.