Is Google Sheets less or more accurate than Microsoft Excel?

Question

I am aware of the general problem of numerical inaccuracies with floating point numbers, but I would expect Excel and Google Sheets to behave the same. Unfortunately, they don\'

Answer 1

Is this documented somewhere?

The only piece of documentation that I could find was this post from Excel regarding Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel. From there, we can reach some conclussions with regards to the rest of your questions.

Should I expect the two to behave differently?

Yes, most likely implementations are different.

Are differences an unintentional by-product of different implementations (number formats, maybe), or intentional?

Probably they are due to implementation limitations. I don't think they would intentionally return innaccuracies on purpose.

Is Google Sheets less or more accurate than Microsoft Excel?

To test accuracy we would need to perform calculations by hand or with a good and trustworthy calculator and then compare those to the results given by both Excel and Google Sheets. We would also need to test this accuracy on a range of formulas and operations to be able to drive a consistent conclussion.

I hope this has helped you. Let me know if you need anything else or if you did not understood something. :)