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Microsoft Excel fails math test

Associated Press

Latest comment posted at 8:14 AM EDT 02/10/07

Spreadsheet program is going to have to relearn part of its multiplication table ...Read the full article

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  1. Duncan Munro from Langley BC, Canada writes: www.openoffice.org...and say goodbye to Excel forever.
  2. L B from Toronto, writes: Buahahah....only Microsoft
  3. Fool Monty from Vancouver, Canada writes: That's what MS gets for messing with a classic. I'm an excel dork, and have been using it for years. The 2003 version is dandy, and gives me all the boring spreadsheets a finance guy could ever conceive of. I used 2007 for the first time, and it's just not intuitive in its function and design. Now it turns out, not intuitive in its math. Booooo.
  4. G P from St. John's, Canada writes: OpenOffice may be fine for "book-keepers" but as an engineer I NEED the additional equation solving tools that come with excel. It's either that or use a much less user friendly program like Matlab or maple. These bugs are pretty minor and will be worked out in no time. The new interface for excel is very nice as well.
  5. Greg MacKinnon from Canada writes: Fool Monty, I completly disagree. As a finance guy as well, 07 is soooo much better in 03 in most repects. Conditional cell formating, data analysis , etc. are all laid out in a much better way... the charting is much, much better than in 03 if I don't have time to send it off to the formating/media dept. and , despite what I had initally heard, the shortcuts are pretty much all the same.
  6. ra ku from to, Canada writes: GP,

    If you are an engineer you should stop using Excell, period. Excel may be good to CFOs or financial analysts looking for some vaguely defined "trends" and such, but pple who really work and care about numbers usually avoid it with a 10 foot pole. As a statistician working often with doctors, who like to collect their data in Excel, I always request as much of the raw, un-excelled data as possible. I have been bitten many times with Excel's luck of basic understanding of numerical issues, like proper rounding, wrong formulas (one famous example is Excel 97 and its completely screwed up linear regression equations) etc.

    BTW, 65,535 is 2 to power 16-1, a famous computer number since it is the largest representable in unsigned 16bit integer. Everyone who knows anything about computer calculations would have checked its software against such a number as a boundary case. Not Excel though.
  7. Northern Focus from your town, Canada writes: I guess that's why Bill G. said "640K is enough for anybody" years ago... his math was off (and still is)?

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