Roy Schestowitz wrote:
High Plains Thumper on Tuesday:
Roy Schestowitz wrote:
[H]omer on Tuesday:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel/
browse_thread/thread/2bcad1a1a4861879/2f8806d5400dfe22?
hl=en#2f8806d5400dfe22
or http://tinyurl.com/2lgg7w
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q161234
Goes back as far as Excel 5.0.
<SNIP>
It's one among the many bugs, some of them are _by
design_, e.g. getting the function floor() wrong. As Rob
Weir said, this can cost /lives/.
Not just lives, but budgets.
Interesting, I'll have to check it out. I am sure any
decent level management will not be happy if they hear such.
After all, there are people who maintain multimillion quid
budgets using it. I guess an error as large as the EU fines
owed by Microsoft are no big deal. Bill must be laughing
all the way with money falling out of his pockets.
Has any one published the same equations entered into
OpenOffice? I'd like to see the results. :-)
Lives are more important than money, but I fail to grasp how a
coding mistake can corrupt maths. A processor does
computation. It handles maths. How a program subvert maths on
a CPU is beyond me...
A bug is a bug. If problem goes back to Excel 5.0, perhaps
something slipped up in their software quality control? Old code
that should have been retired sneaked its way back in? Is their
software quality control adequate?
I guess it's a {binary condition}^TM when you have 5 coders
working in cubicle on a bunch of crucial code _in isolation_.
This IMHO, is the advantage of Open Sourced software. There are
more sets of eyes on it, scrutinising the code.
If I were an accountant, I'd ditch MSO and definitely avoid
MSO07. Such bugs are unacceptable. Maths of the bread and
butter of spreadsheets.
I think this among other reasons are why corporations and
government offices are slow to adopt Vista OS and Office 2007.
The good side is it gives people another reason to seek out
options, which includes Linux and Open Source.
--
HPT
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