A few weeks ago we reported about a serious excel multiplication bug that was exposed in which Excel 2007 incorrectly multiplied certain numbers. For example, by multiplying 850 by 77.1, you’d receive an answer of 100,000. We know that the answer is really 65,535, and unfortunately, that wasn’t the only number that Excel was having issues with. Microsoft acknowledged the issue, and yesterday they released an update that solves the problem.
Now what’s interesting is that this update is almost 33 MB in size which is large for what would seem to be a simple fix. The Excel blog offers an explanation for the size though, they say “The patch is large because it contains updates for several components that use the Excel logic that showed this issue.” They also explained more specifically which numbers were involved. If a multiplication calculation resulted in an answer of 65534.99999999995 to 65535, it would display an incorrect answer of 100,000. If a multiplication calculation resulted in an answer of 65535.99999999995 to 65536, Excel would display an incorrect answer of 100,001.
If you’re in a rush to get this issue fixed, below is the direct link to the update. If you don’t really use Excel much, you might as well wait it out because Microsoft says that the update will get automatically pushed out to those using Excel 2007. Service Pack 1 for Office 2007 will also include the update, although no specific release date has been announced for it.
Thanks for the tip S!
Source: Download Squad
now, I’m no coding expert, but it seems to me that if Microsoft wrote programs like they should (with high modularity) this patch should be a lot smaller. I’m guessing they did too many copy/pastes.
That’s good that they fixed it relatively quickly.
They’ve got deadlines to meet. :)
I was actually suprised that it got pumped out so quick. I thought it would take a few months for them to finally get around to it. Guess they thought it was serious enough though.
I was surprised too that the patch was so big, but I’d think there would be a good reason for it.