Microsoft Big Flub

One of their flagship products, Excel , has been caught
making errors doing simple multiplication.   href="http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx">According
to a Microsoft Developer blog:



Yesterday evening we were alerted to an
issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of
numbers around 65,535.  The first example that we heard about
was =77.1*850, but it became clear from our testing as well as
additional reports that this was just one instance where Excel 2007
would return a value of 100,000 instead of 65,535.



You have to wonder how many interstate-bridge-designing engineers use
Excel.



Tags

More like this

As I understand it, a clear majority of spreadsheets have errors in them put there by the users, e.g. incorrect formulae. That seems to be a worse thing to worry about!

By Mathematician (not verified) on 01 Oct 2007 #permalink