Thought I would share a cartoon I saw:
From http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png (sorry, I don’t know who the original artist is, if I find out they will of course get credit)
Excel 2007 calculation bug fix released after two weeks
October 10, 2007 — Adam VeroA fix for the Excel 2007 calculation bug affecting results around 65535 and 65536 has been released in the last few hours. The Excel team blog post says:
As of today, fixes for this issue in Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007 are available for download…We are in the process of adding this fix to Microsoft Update so that it will get automatically pushed to users running Excel 2007 or Excel Services 2007. Additionally, the fix will also be contained in the first service pack of Office 2007 when it is released (the release date for SP1 of Office 2007 has not been finalized).
Microsoft knowledgebase article KB943075 discusses the fix and gives the usual details for what versions and sizes the updated files should have after the fix. The version number of Excel.exe is altered from 12.0.6024.5000 to 12.0.6042.5000. Now read that again – yes, easy to miss the difference from ‘24′ to ‘42′ if you look too quickly. (NB: you may have a different version, mine is at 12.0.6024 after installing the security update as per KB936509, as far as I can tell.)
The download for the fix for Excel 2007 (33Mb exe file) is linked from the Excel team blog as well as from the KB article. The blog post also has links for Excel Services 2007, both 32 bit and 64 bit.
Excel 2007 bug shows wrong answers to simple multiplications
October 2, 2007 — Adam VeroThis is a follow-up post to my earlier one about a bug in the way Excel 2007 displays the results of certain calculations. Read that one first of you have not already done so.
A few people in the comments thread in the Excel team blog post about the bug seem to have some misconceptions about the seriousness of the problem. Some have asked how often it is likely to come up, implying that they think it is vanishingly unlikely. This seems to be particularly those who have misunderstood that the example of 850*77.1 is only one simple example which is easy to remember and to type, but there are several more simple ones as well as thousands of other combinations which lead to the buggy result (due to floating point rounding errors in the calculation hitting a result which is sufficiently close to 65,535 to cause the false display of 100,000). Nine examples are shown in the screenshot below, and in a table you can easily copy and paste to try this for yourself.
