More on the Excel 2007 Muliplication Bug
More on the MS Excel 2007 bug (see my last post). It seems that Microsoft have a fix, and one of their guys has posted information about the bug on the Microsoft MSDN website. One statement they made caught my eye as being a bit specious:
‘The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet. Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).’
Err, that’s not good enough. It doesn’t matter what the underlying cell contains - if it shows the wrong number, that’s what people will read, and they’ll use the wrong number. ‘Harrumph, in my day when a computer printed out an answer, that was what you thought the computer was saying was its answer’.
Should have used Mathematica.
Postscript 10th October: Microsoft have posted a fix.
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