ZTEST needs clarification

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi,

The spec for ZTEST has

| TODO: OOo Calc and Gnumeric produce the same results. Excel (2007 beta) claims
| to calculate the one-tailed test.
| All produce different results than expected! What OOo Calc and Gnumeric
| calculate is out of my scope. Excel tries to calculate the probability by
| integrating from minus infinity to z and substracts this from one. That would
| only be right, if the absolute value of z is taken, not the signed z! (I speak
| already of the one-tailed results for this case, so no confusion here.) 
| So, either I made a mistake/misinterpretation or all three apps don't get it
| right(TM).

Back in February 2007 we had some discussion about ZTEST, see
Message-id: <1170978256.4116.5.camel@opteron.lab.math.concordia.ab.ca>
respectively in the archive
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-formula/200702/msg00047.html
and thread.

How does that match with the comment above in the spec? Do we have
a definitive answer to the problem?

The confusion now continues for OOoCalc implementors, see
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=90759#desc21
and
http://sc.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=3086

Can we sort this out, please? What is ZTEST exactly supposed to do?

Thanks
  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.

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