> and transmit not only the results of those calculations, but the actual environment itself, to anyone in the world, and expect that if they have a computer, they can replicate your results.
I think this is the real secret. It's really the only kind of "model" where the environment travels with it. Everyone has the same Excel setup. If it works for you it will work for them.
I wish this was true. The biggest problem is different language versions that cause all sorts of problems. Did you know that Excel formulae names are localized? For example AVERAGE is MITTELWERT if you have a German Excel and there are some with umlauts as well.
But there are more subtler problems. I'm an engineer and I used to work a lot with radians and degree values. There is this nice little trick in excel where you can enter radians and have it display as degrees. It works using the date format but only if you have 1900 dates enabled. I used to to use that for a short while until I noticed that all dates in spreadsheets from other people are off by 30 years.
Edit: I see someone made the same point below, but I definitely haven’t had Excel installed in years. And that’s across multiple billion-dollar employers.
I think this is the real secret. It's really the only kind of "model" where the environment travels with it. Everyone has the same Excel setup. If it works for you it will work for them.