Microsoft fixes Excel calculation bug

Microsoft has made available for download patches to an Excel 2007 bug discovered late last month and is working on pushing the fix out over Microsoft Update.

The Excel team acknowledged the obscure bug on September 24 which affected Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007 users attempting to perform calculations of numbers around 65,535 and 65,536. Officials said Excel was calculating the values correctly, but the function in it that takes the value and formats it to be displayed on the screen was faulty

On October 9, the Excel team blogged:

"We are in the process of adding this fix to Microsoft Update so that it will get automatically pushed to users running Excel 2007 or Excel Services 2007.  Additionally, the fix will also be contained in the first service pack of Office 2007 when it is released (the release date for SP1 of Office 2007 has not been finalized)."

Microsoft made a beta of Service Pack (SP) 1 for Office available on August 15, but would not share publicly a ship-date target.

(From Memory (It doesn't add up anymore). Image by Unhindered by Talent. CC 2.0.)