Nonstandard operator precedence in Excel

Roger L. Berger

doi:10.1016/j.csda.2006.09.040

Nonstandard operator precedence in Excel

Roger L. Berger

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program implements an unusual operator precedence in formulas. This can cause errors in statistical calculations, if it is not properly followed. For example, some errors by Excel in nonlinear regression reported by McCullough and Wilson (2002. On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2000 and Excel XP. Comput. Statist. Data Anal. 40, 713-721) were probably due to programming by the users that did not follow the unusual operator precedence rules. In this note the operator precedence in Excel is explained, the previous nonlinear regression results are corrected, and a simple example of maximum likelihood estimation is given.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	2788-2791
Number of pages	4
Journal	Computational Statistics and Data Analysis
Volume	51
Issue number	6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2006.09.040
State	Published - Mar 1 2007

Keywords

Microsoft Excel
Nonlinear regression
Operator precedence
Unary negation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Statistics and Probability
Computational Mathematics
Computational Theory and Mathematics
Applied Mathematics

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10.1016/j.csda.2006.09.040

Cite this

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KW - Unary negation

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Nonstandard operator precedence in Excel

Abstract

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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