Daily posts of Excel tips…and other stuff
Two weeks ago, we posted about an issue involving the calculation of numbers around 65,535 and 65,536. As of today, fixes for this issue in Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007 are available for download from the following locations:
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Hui...:
There goes my pay rise !
11 October 2007, 6:40 pm$100,000 back to $65,536 overnight
Hugh Lerwill:
>the following locations
16 October 2007, 2:23 pmBut I see no links…
Doug Jenkins:
Hugh - click on “Dave Gainer writes” and it will take you to the links. The fix hasn’t made its way into auto updates yet, so if you are using XL2007 for purposes where an error of (100,000 - 65,535) would be embarrasing, I recommend the download.
While you’re there, if you read through the comments you’ll find this link:
http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2007/Excel2007/Excel2007Bug.pdf
which is a detailed description of exactly where the bug came from and how it was fixed.
It is an excellent article but it repeats (several times) that the bug is only in the rendering, and only affects 12 numbers out of the more than 9*10^18 possible floating point numbers that can be generated in Excel. This is true, but in my opinion misleading. Because the critical numbers can be generated by multiplying an integer less than 1000 by a single decimal point number less than 100, and because commercial computing is full of just such multiplications, the chances of hitting the bug by accident is enormously higher than 12/(9*10^18). About a trillion times higher by my estimation.
But if you install the fix, that’s academic
16 October 2007, 4:34 pmHugh Lerwill:
Thanks Doug..
17 October 2007, 9:59 am