Showing posts with label Error Bars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Error Bars. Show all posts

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Error bars in Excel

I recently upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 and quickly regretted it. While Microsoft continually makes their programs more visually appealing, very rarely do they add any improvement in functionality, and quite often, things only seem to get worse.

(On a related note, I recently read that Internet Explorer is the only web browser still using a faulty method for interpreting CSS layouts, which is why for the forseeable future, all webpage files will have to begin with an otherwise unnecessary piece of code that does nothing but tell IE to behave properly.)

Anyway, as a scientist, I'm always using error bars. Error bars are a visual way of representing the uncertainty associated with a measurement ... and they are critical for everything we do. No data is meaningful unless one can ascribe an estimate of how close a measured value might be to a true value - a number we can never be totally confident of. So error bars are important. And they keep getting harder and harder to find.