Excel 2007 calculation errors

A lot of places have carried stories lately about issues in Excel 2007 where it fails at simple maths.

The original newsgroups report is here. Microsoft has published a bit of an explanation, but I don’t think they have yet grasped the root cause of the problem. Some posts are showing clearly conflicting information with what Microsoft is stating with issues such as the following in Excel:

A1 =850*77.1   --> 100000
B1 =A1+1       --> 100001 (really a display bug???)
C1 =A1-1       --> 65534
D1 =B1-C1      --> 2

This could have quite a number of effects in people who rely on Excel to do business. No fix is currently available. Excel 2003 and earlier are not affected, nor is OpenOffice.