

Serious bug found in Excel 2007 ::: 850*77.1 = 100,000 and not 65535 - nickb
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel/browse_thread/thread/2bcad1a1a4861879/2f8806d5400dfe22?hl=en&#

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savrajsingh
somebody pointed out that Excel is storing the value correctly as 65535, but
is setting the text as "100,000". Here's how to test. type the equation in
cell A1. Hit Alt+F11, then CTRL+G to get to the "VBA Immediate Window". Type
print Range("A1").Value and hit enter. You'll get 65535. If you do .Text
instead, you'll get 100000.

Even better, If you make Cell A2 =A1*2, you get 131070. A3 =A1+1 yields
100001. Hmm. ;)

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oditogre
[http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=307215&cid=207394...](http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=307215&cid=20739457)

That seems like the most plausible theory I've seen so far.

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drm237
Is it really "Serious" though? I mean, this isn't exactly devastating. Office
2007 has been out for almost a year and this being the first time we've heard
about it seems to imply that not many users have run into this issue. It's
poor that this got by their internal testing, but I'm not sure it's Serious.

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nickb
Well, how many have actually gone undetected? There are quite a few papers out
there that show that Excel-induced accounting/financial errors are a lot more
common than previously thought. Some financial services have gone as so far to
prohibit the use of Excel in their financial planning and forecasting.

Check out some of the papers on Google Scholar for bibliography:
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=excel+bug&btnG=Search)

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mojuba
I guess Microsoft's valuation of Facebook was done in Excel. Can anybody check
if 6,553,500,000 gives 10,000,000,000 ?

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hello_moto
"Microsoft in recent weeks approached Facebook with proposals to invest in the
startup that could value the fast-growing site at $10 billion or higher, said
people familiar with the matter."

Who puts the valuation for Facebook? was it MS or WSJ assumption?

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mojuba
Funny thing is, 65,536 is 200,000 octal. They can't even make elegant
mistakes.

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henning
Somehow I don't think the idea of an elegant mistake would go over very well
with Ballmer. God damn philistine business people.

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Xichekolas
Uh, hello?!, this is a feature... somehow...

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breck
Not just a feature--it's my favorite feature! I charge clients $850 per day
and make sure each contract lasts 77.1 days. Then I have them compute the
total in Excel themselves(so they can be sure the amount is correct) and write
me a check for $100,000. It's a feature!!

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mynameishere
Microsoft calc.exe gets the answer right.

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nailer
OpenOffice calc gets it right too.

