September 29, 2007

Microsoft Excel Bug??

Don't mind me changing fonts for a few posts as I'm wondering which font I should stick my blog with since I'm quite fed-up with "Verdana" lately.

Interesting.... I got this piece of news that Microsoft Excel 2007 has a calculation bug from The Age as I was scouring for news from OZ-land. Anyway, I did try out the test and it did offer a glitch!!

Give it a go.

Test as follows,
  1. 77.1 * 850
  2. 10.2 * 6425
  3. 20.4 * 3212.5
The answer provided by Excel 2007 is 100000. The correct answer should be 65535.

According to David Gainer's latest blog entry, this bug is being fixed and should be available as a patch, downloadable later. I'm not sure if it would be bundled with the normal "Patch Tuesday" round of patches, but we'll see. ;-)

And just to show you that I wasn't kidding, here's the screenshot I took a while ago...

Click on the image for a larger pic...

Looks like someone needs to teach Excel 2007 some maths? (^ ^)

11 comments:

  1. I tested it just now. Yup.. that's a bug.

    Here are some of the results. The first & second are wrong, the third is correct:

    =(77.1*850) >> Result :100000
    =(77.1*850)+1 >> Result :100001
    =(77.1*850)-1 >> Result :65534

    Hahaha

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Vincent,

    Wow.. Thanks for the interesting results too. Kekeke.. (^ ^)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous9:50 am

    My Excel program is four years behind time, which means the bugs have died of old age by now.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi cirnelle,

    LOL!! I think your current Excel program didn't suffer from this bug. Apparently, this only affects the new version. ;-)

    It's probably due to the new code base or something.

    ReplyDelete
  5. there are many other bugs in word too... some are really interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Another interesting thing, but not a bug, the whole Office 2007 file system is now based on XML (and the new interface is called the RibbonX interface, which is much easier to manipulate and customize using XML.... easier than the old VBA method mah)

    Try to rename any Excel 2007 file to ZIP. Example: abc.xlsx >> abc.zip

    Then open it in Winzip and you'll be able to see all the XML files inside. Drag and drop any of the XML file to a text editor and you can see the contents. :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. So basically the new Office file is just a bunch of archived/compressed XML text files huh :D

    ReplyDelete
  8. hi zewt,

    yeap.. hehehehehe. care to share? (^ ^)

    i like the spellcheck whenever i type someone's name as "Teh", it becomes "The" until I disable the item in the spellcheck. which is not a bug per se...

    ReplyDelete
  9. hi vincent,

    yeap, office 2007 is so cool because of that. unfortunately, it's still not rolled out across the company as a whole just yet and so, we can't enjoy that flexibility.

    so, i'm still saving my docs in compatible format. :-P

    i'm a fan of XML for its portability, not for processing it. Hehehe.. Find me a faster parser!!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Interesting!! LOL at the microsoft excel thing! If students use that to do their assignments and fail to get the right answer, sure gonna sue microsoft till pok kai! hahahaha

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi Sabrina,

    Yep, those students working on their accounting, statistics and some spreadsheet-related assignments may run into some slight problems.

    However, not to worry, am sure that there'll be a patch out soon. (^ ^)

    ReplyDelete

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