Excel Tip 3: Excel Calculation Mess

- contributed by Deep Moni Hazarika

What’s wrong with the calculations below? Hint: Related to Excel 2007

This is one of the problem numbers (there are many!) for Excel 2007. If the problem is still not decipherable, here’s the answer. These are the multiplication of two numbers A and B which gives the wrong result in Excel. Multiplying 77.1 with 850 should return 65535, but Excel 2007 calculation has messed it up here. It appears that Excel 2007 also needs some multiplication tables tutoring. Haha!

One of the employees of Microsoft posted about this flaw in the MSDN blog, also making it clear that the error is in the presentation and not in the calculation. In the above example, multiplying the resulting cell with 2 correctly gives 131070. Anyhow, what matters to us is how we are able to see the result. So was there a fix for that?

 Yes! There is a solution and that’s the good news. The fix to error was made available in the Excel 2007 hotfix package. Information about the fixes are also available in Microsoft Office Suites Service Pack 1.

Click here to directly download the Excel 2007 hotfix package.
Click here to directly download the 2007 Microsoft Office Suites Service Pack 1.

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