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Excel 2007 Forgot Multiplication Skills

by Jason Bean on September 26th, 2007

excel-multiplication I personally am loving the new Office 2007. I’ve been using it since way back in the early beta days and I think it’s great. There’s still stuff I can’t find, but it’s no more than the stuff I couldn’t find or rarely used in the earlier versions. My boss and brother on the other hand can’t stand it. I guess there were more proficient and advanced at using various items so the learning curve has been more like careening down Lombard Street in San Francisco.

One thing you’d expect from Excel though, back to version 1.0 is that it could handle simple arithmetic like addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. It appears though that Excel 2007 has forgotten it’s multiplication charts.

If it were just 850*77.1 that gave a wrong answer, we could probably work around that. But there are tons of other problem numbers, as I discovered for myself. I set up a spreadsheet to divide 65,535 by every number from 1 to 65,535 itself, then multiply the number by that result. So, for example, it divided 65,535 by 26 to get 2,520.577. Then it multiplied 26 by 2,520.577 to get… 100,000?! Over ten thousand of these simple calculations gave the wrong answer.

I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems to me that a crucial office application like Excel that can’t do some simple math problems is a really big issue.

The writers at AppScout have updated their original story with the following news from Microsoft:

UPDATE: Microsoft recognizes the problem and assures us that Excel Will Learn to Multiply.

GOOD NEWS: The Excel team has dissected the problem in detail and is working feverishly to swat this Excel bug.

I wonder when this fix will be seen in the real world and be updated on everyone’s systems. Should we expect this in a standard patch Tuesday release?

Source: Excel Can’t Multiply

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POSTED IN: Business Users, Excel, Home User, Office, Software, Software Errors, Students, User Experience

1 opinion for Excel 2007 Forgot Multiplication Skills

  • Rahul.
    May 16, 2008 at 6:12 am

    Excel 2007 is Worthless!!!!!!!Worthless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Worthless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!and Slower!!!!!!!!!!!!!Slower!!!!!!!!!!!!!Slower!!!!!!!!!!!!!Slower!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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