Real World Computing
Recovery for HP
Just for OWA, this is an impressive list. I particularly liked the ability to create and edit server-side rules, and the support for Office 2007 file formats. Naturally, this isn't the end of the story - almost every area of Exchange 2007 has been tweaked and improved, and now it's certified to run on Server 2008. The combination should be superb, and I suggest Exchange 2003 users give it a good look over the coming months.
Excel, yet again
I couldn't let this month go past without a little dig at Microsoft's innumerate spreadsheet Excel. An anonymous reader sent me a paper written in 2006 by Professor William Kahan of UC Berkeley, who was one of the developers of the IEEE arithmetic standard. He discusses the way Excel fudges numbers to make them appear right, but shows examples of how this fudging can go wrong and points out those functions for which the input number isn't the fudged value but the displayed value; for example, "ROUND is one of Excel's functions that acts upon the displayed value of its argument, unlike functions like ACOS that act upon the true value". His closing comment is one to remember:
"How can a user of Excel predict which functions act upon displayed instead of actual values? Which expressions get rounded cosmetically before being displayed? The user's program cannot be debugged without an awareness of these questions, and an aware user ends up debugging Microsoft's pious fraud instead of just a malfunctioning Excel spreadsheet. 'Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.' F von Schiller (1759-1805)."
Read the full paper at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/161advwin.
