Excel 850 x 77.1 Bug

You may have seen this on Digg, but I figured I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it here. The title of the post at Digg was a little bit dramatic (“Critical Excel 2007 bug cripples users“), but the problem is real. The bug doesn’t exactly cripple users, but it is a pretty big flaw in Excel 2007.

The problem occurs when you try to multiply 850 and 77.1. A calculator will tell you the answer is 65,535, but Excel reports the answer is 100,000. Go ahead and try it.

In fact, there are other number combinations that should result in 65,535 that wind up incorrectly displaying 100,000.

Anyhow, as I said at the beginning, this has been reported elsewhere. I just wanted to make sure as many people knew about the problem as possible. Hopefully Microsoft will correct this soon.