Excel can’t do no rif-ma-tick
Saturday, September 29th, 2007So we all know that Microsoft products aren’t perfect. Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, but it is probably because they are under so much scrutiny. This time, one of their own has come forward in his own blog to let us know that Excel 2007 has some issues with some numbers. He wrote that Excel makes mistakes multiplying 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6,425 and 20.4 by 3,212.5, but the program appears to be able to handle 16,383.75 times 4. What happened when you multiply these pairs of numbers and the result was 65,535, Excel would incorrectly display 100,000 as the answer.
We noticed that there was an issue with results in the 65,536 range, also.
The explanation? Well, 65536 is the result of 2 to the 16th power, or 2 multiplied by itself 16 times, which is common in binary calculations. The issue lies in the ability of Excel to round off numbers like 65535.9999999999999995 which also have 16 numbers behind the decimal point.
From now on, I am pricing everything with these multipliers…