Excel number formatting problem fixed

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 11 October 2007 01:53

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft has released a patch for Excel 2007 to fix a bug that caused certain numbers to be displayed incorrectly.

Calculations resulting in values between 65534.99999999995 and 65535 were displayed as 100000, while results between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 appeared in spreadsheets as 100001. In both situations the arithmetic was carried out correctly and the fault was confined to the way the numbers were shown.

The bug occurred in Excel 2007 and in SharePoint Server 2007's Excel Services.

The patches will be offered via Microsoft Update and eventually included in Office 2007 SP1. Separate knowledge base articles describe the hotfixes for Excel and Excel Services, and provide download links.

The patches were released two weeks after Microsoft warned users of the issue. According to the Microsoft Excel Blog, the team created a fix within a day of receiving the first report of the problem - the rest of the time was needed to complete testing and for the patch to work its way through the company's build and release process.