Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 14, 1995 TAG: 9510170016
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: HOUSTON LENGTH: Medium
Microsoft has been aware of the problem for about three weeks. A company official said Friday a fix has been developed and will be released early next week.
The bug, discovered last month by Houston's Schwartz Yeager & Associates, occurs when numbers are linked to each other in a certain way across different pages of an Excel spreadsheet. Changing one number does not update the second one as it should.
``That's a major, major bug,'' said Cheryl Currid, a Houston-based technology consultant and columnist for Windows magazine. ``Microsoft needs to tell its users about this. Too many people are running their businesses on Excel.''
The company posted a brief notice Oct. 3 in its online Knowledge Base, where it is one of thousands of articles about Microsoft products. The Knowledge Base primarily is used by the company's technical support staff, though the public does have access to it via on-line services and the Internet.
The bug appears when one of a specific group of cells on an Excel worksheet is linked to the contents of a cell in the same place on a second worksheet. The linked cells do not update properly.
Linking cells is common in a spreadsheet program, a form of electronic ledger used to manage the financial dealings of businesses and individuals. Linked cells are particularly useful for creating budgets or crafting ``what-if'' scenarios.
The bug only occurs in the 7.0 version of Excel.
Jim Yeager, of the Houston financial consulting firm of Schwartz Yeager & Associates, found the bug when he transferred work from Excel 5.0 to 7.0. When he changed a number on one worksheet in the newer Excel, he noticed that a linked cell was not changing as it should.
Yeager said when he told Microsoft's technical support department about what he'd found, they told him to go back to using Excel 5.0.
by CNB