27
Sep

Excel 07 Bug

Author: admin

There is apparently a bug in the new version of Excel that returns the wrong number when you multiply certain numbers. An ex-MS programmer addresses the issue…

The first thing you have to understand is that Excel keeps numbers, internally, in a binary format, but displays them as strings. For example, when you type 77.1, Excel stores this internally using 64 bits:

0100 0000 0101 0011 0100 0110 0110 0110
0110 0110 0110 0110 0110 0110 0110 0110

The display is showing you four characters: “7″, “7″, “.”, and “1″.

Somewhere inside Excel is a function that converts binary numbers to strings for displaying. This is the code that has the bug that causes a few numbers which are extremely close to 65,535 to be formatted incorrectly as 100,000.

For more: Excel Bug

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 9:42 am and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or TrackBack URI from your own site.

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