Discussion on:

Tip: Excel 2007 has interesting bug

The problem has been extensively discussed in the blogosphere. It turns out it is a display problem, not an arithmetic problem.

It is detailed here:

blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx

Here's the nub of it:

Of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers that Excel 2007 can store, there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem. You can?t actually enter these numbers into Excel directly (since Excel will round to 15 digits on entry), but any calculation returning one of those results will display this issue if the results of the calculation are displayed in a cell.

They emphasize that this is *only* (:-?) a display problem. The number is calculated and stored correctly, but displayed incorrectly.

I read that discussion soon after reading the article I linked. I've seen a number of discussions and the idea that it's "only" a display problem is odd -- if I sent such a number to a check run, it certainly would matter.

Not only does the EXCEL error on many other numbers for multiplication, the conditional formatting behaves as if the correct number is being displayed as well.

It seems likely that when they fix the the bug, this will remedy itself... hopefully.

About the fix:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2194768,00.asp

To download the fix:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/10/09/calculation-issue-update-fix-available.aspx

It took about 4 minutes to download and 3 to install.

My excel column letters have changed to numbers how do I change it back to letters.