“We all learned how to multiply with pencil and paper, even great big numbers and decimals. But when it comes to something important like a blueprint or a scientific formula we reach for a calculator – or a spreadsheet. That’s much more reliable, right? Well, not if the spreadsheet is Excel 2007. Over the weekend a member of the microsoft.public.excel newsgroup revealed that Excel 2007 thinks that 850*77.1 is 100,000,” Neil Rubenking reports for AppScout.
MacDailyNews Note: That’s funny, Apple’s Numbers says 850*77.1= 65,535. In other words, the correct answer.
Rubenking continues, “If it were just 850*77.1 that gave a wrong answer, we could probably work around that. But there are tons of other problem numbers, as I discovered for myself. I set up a spreadsheet to divide 65,535 by every number from 1 to 65,535 itself, then multiply the number by that result. So, for example, it divided 65,535 by 26 to get 2,520.577. Then it multiplied 26 by 2,520.577 to get… 100,000?! Over ten thousand of these simple calculations gave the wrong answer.”
MacDailyNews Note: Doing the same thing with Apple’s Numbers yields the correct results every time.
Full article with links here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s another little equation: $400 for Office 2008 for Mac – $79 for iWork ’08 = $321 in your pocket and the ability to multiply correctly.
