Slashdot Mirror
Excel 2007 Multiplication Bug
tibbar66 writes with news of a serious multiplication bug in Excel 2007, which has been reported to the company. The example that first came to light is =850*77.1 — which gives a result of 100,000 instead of the correct 65,535. It seems that any formula that should evaluate to 65,535 will act strangely. One poster in the forum noted these behaviors: "Suppose the formula is in A1. =A1+1 returns 100,001, which appears to show the formula is in fact 100,000... =A1*2 returns 131,070, as if A1 had 65,535 (which it should have been). =A1*1 keeps it at 100,000. =A1-1 returns 65,534. =A1/1 is still 100,000. =A1/2 returns 32767.5."
Weird. I can't get it to appear in my work copy of Excel 2003. Nor can I get it to appear in any of the apps on any of my systems.
Maybe some patch caused/fixed it? Or else it could be another CPU bug.
Something seriously seems to be wrong at Digg. Why rubbish stories get dugg 1000s of times, while this important one has less than 10 diggs after 2 hours, 42 minutes (as I post this) baffles me. I've even posted this on the Digg comments for this page.
Digg is certainly more popular than Slashdot, which probably explains why there's so much more incentive to block such serious bugs in Microsoft products getting highlighted.
This is very very fishy indeed.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Ugh, why? Here's a sample response from a Digger
"How often do you use Excel for a calculation that will result in 65535? I'll agree that it is a bug, but I hardly think that it cripples Excel."
Let's just leave those Brainiacs to it. Best hope for reaching the masses is a story in BBC Technology news or something like it.