Steve's Blog

A lot of places have carried stories lately about issues in Excel 2007 where it fails at simple maths. The original newsgroups report is here. Microsoft has published a bit of an explanation, but I don’t think they have yet grasped the root cause of the problem. Some posts are showing clearly conflicting information with what Microsoft is stating with issues such as the following in Excel:

A1 =850*77.1 –> 100000
B1 =A1+1 –> 100001 (really a display bug???)
C1 =A1-1 –> 65534
D1 =B1-C1 –> 2

This could have quite a number of effects in people who rely on Excel to do business. No fix is currently available. Excel 2003 and earlier are not affected, nor is OpenOffice.

While not quite calling it a service pack, Microsoft have released two major updates for Windows Vista. Microsoft have labelled these as a Performance Update and Reliability Update. The biggest change I found is the copy/move/delete file operations are behaving as they should after the Performance Update. The Reliability Update apparently fixes many standby and power management issue.

You can download these at:

• Performance Update: 32bit and 64bit (KB Article)
  
• Reliability Update: 32bit and 64 bit (KB Article)
  

Happy patching