Serious numerical bug in Excel 2007
One thing you might reasonably expect computers to do correctly is to multiply two numbers together. Last week though, it transpired that Microsoft Excel 2007 is struggling a bit and needs to go to night classes in order to brush up on arithmetic. If you try to calculate 850*77.1 then Excel 2007 returns the result 100000 which is a little way off from the correct answer of 65,535. Oops!
I discovered this bug in the blog at Wolfram Research but after a little googling it turns out that The Register has also mentioned it. It is not quite as serious as it first looks though – According to this Microsoft blog the bug is only in the function that displays the result. The correct answer is in memory and will be used in subsequent calculations.
I guess that there will be a fix soon but until then feel free to show all of your friends that Excel 2007 can’t do basic mathematics.