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Floating Point Bug In Excel 2007 Confirmed

Microsoft seems to have been spending way too much time on form, and not enough on function with Excel 2007. A bug has been confirmed in the floating point math routines, which, it would seem, should have been fully debugged from previous versions of the program.

The confirmed problem is multiplications where the product is the sixteenth power of 2 or the sixteenth power of 2 minus 1 (65,535), Excel pops up the answer as 100,000.  According to the tester at BetaNews, the actual value held in the spreadsheet memory is correct, as a multiply by another cell will yield the correct number, so the problem is a formatting one.

The really strange part is that Microsoft acknowledged a problem, but doesn’t yet have a fix.

I suppose, a plus would be that Microsoft was trying to make the calculations better than Excel 2003 would produce in some way, but it does seem that some sort of computerized testing should have been done since the method of calculation was changed.

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