Microsoft Excel needs math lessons
4 comments
Filed in Software
We haven’t quite figured out what’s more hilarious…Excel doing math wrong, or the guys who figured it out. David Gainer, a Microsoft employee, says in a blog entry that when users of Excel 2007 ask the program to multiply numbers, and the end result is 65,535, the answer inexplicably results in 100,000. After further nerdiness "testing," the odd occurance is said to be limited to six numbers from 65,534.99999999995 to 65,535, and six numbers from 65,535.99999999995 to 65,536. Just in time for budget season…
On Sep 29, 2007 @ 8:47 am, Galvatron Said:
Rontflmfao
It’s too much.
Permalink | Reply
On Sep 29, 2007 @ 10:18 am, Nate Lee Said:
Sorry, I don’t get the joke - why is it “hilarious” that THE primary business spreadsheet application has a fairly serious bug? This seems more concerning than funny, to me.
And WOW, this is the most acute case of “pot calling kettle black” I’ve seen in a while - a nerd at BGR calling a programmer a “nerd”.
Permalink | Reply
On Sep 29, 2007 @ 10:25 am, Neil Said:
It’s funny because there are better free alternatives for spread sheeting such as OpenOffice.org’s Calc that don’t have ugly hacks like this beneath the surface. Yet, everyone uses Excel “because it’s made by Microsoft”
Permalink | Reply
On Sep 29, 2007 @ 12:18 pm, Ken Said:
Back in the late 90s MS had a fairly common problem with their floating point math library. When trying to round numbers the DLL would work correctly for even numbers, but odd numbers were truncated vs. rounded. I say this was common because floating point math is complex and MS was not the only company with a faulty library.
Permalink | Reply