Microsoft Says Excel 2007 Produces Math Errors (Information Week)

[eppur_se_muova]

The company says it is working on a fix for the bug, but has yet to release it.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
September 26, 2007 12:20 PM

Red-faced officials at Microsoft have acknowledged that the latest version of the company's Excel spreadsheet program -- an integral part of Office 2007 -- produces significant errors in a small number of cases.

The problem also affects the server-resident version of Excel -- Excel Services.

The officials said Microsoft is working on a fix for the bug, but has yet to release it.

In a blog posting Tuesday, members of Microsoft's Excel development team said the flaw occurs during calculations that would ordinarily result in, or be close to, the number 65,535. Instead, Excel produces a result of 100,000.

The Excel developers said they're not taking the problem lightly. "We take calculation in Excel very seriously and we do everything we can in order to ensure that calculation is correct for all cases," said the blog posting. Microsoft Excel is widely used in everything from basic, back office number crunching to advanced applications such as aeronautics and bridge design.
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more: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202101900

[scarface2004]

1. convert that number to a date or vice versa..

looks familiar?!?!

[eppur_se_muova]

2. June 55th, 1935?

:shrug: I'm missing something ...

[mrfrapp]

3. 16 bit boundary

The number is significant because it's on the 16bit/32bit boundary. I'm not sure what you mean with regards to dates.

I'm not normally one to rag on Microsoft, but the nature of this error is really elementary. It may sound like I'm exaggerating but for a computer programmer, this is a school-boy error.

[BlooInBloo]

4. There are 10 kinds of people in the world.

... Those who know binary, and those who don't.

It should be noted that the bug is a *display* bug, not a calculation bug.

God I love numerical analysis (the field of mathematics which would be more descriptively named "how to get a computer to do math").

[AdHocSolver]

7. I first read the "10" in your header as "ten", rather than as binary "two".

Calculation bug or display bug. It still returns an incorrect answer. This is unacceptable. When you pay so much for a product, you should be confident that such kinds of "silly" mistakes were found and fixed BEFORE the product was released.

We switched to Open Office. Free to download and better quality software. Open Office Writer is more compatible with earlier versions of Microsoft Word than the latest version of Microsoft Word. Did I mention that you can install as many copies of Open Office on any number of computers at no additional cost, and the first copy is free.

You can find out more, and get a download at http://www.openoffice.org/

It has versions that run on Windows 98 through Vista, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris, MAC OS X (under X11), and FreeBSD.

[BlooInBloo]

10. Yes. That's why it's *funny*.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. They boys at Redmond are getting more red faced

over this latest release...

[skids]

6. Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Hah!

Good lord.

[originalpckelly]

8. Reason 65,535 not to buy Microsoft products.

:P

[originalpckelly]

9. OK, did people not get the joke or something?

:shrug:

[BlooInBloo]

11. Or something, unfortunately. Sorry.