Excel 2007 fails simple math

Posted on Sep 27, 07 01:05 AM PDT

Looks like a serious bug in Excel 2007 has been confirmed by a Microsoft manager, where the flaw is uncovered whenever you try to multiply a couple of numbers that end up with 65,535 as the answer. The humble desk calculator does just fine, but the magic of binary numbers in Excel 2007 will result in a total of 100,000. The program also fails when 11 other sets of numbers, ranging from 5.1*12850 to 10.2*6425 and 20.4*3212.5. This bug only occurs in the value Excel displays in a cell, although the stored result in correct. Out of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers that Excel 2007 can store, half a dozen of them exhibit this flaw. A fix is currently in the works as Microsoft engineers sweat it out, hoping that Big Bill won't cut their Christmas bonus this year.

Read...   Add a comment

Your Comments

Featured Posts

Top Stories

Advertisement