Floating Point

Years ago I heard about the way Excel stores numbers. I wrote it off as
something accountants would never have to deal with since we weren't dealing
with high precision numbers. Well...

This past week I tried to upload a journal entry that had about 15K lines.
The computer rejected it as not balancing. In the ninth and tenth decimal
places there was a 15. We tried everything. It became a "class project".
We tried rounding up, rounding down, just plain rounding, truncating. We
copied as values, copied as text and then recopied as numbers. Finally we
found a website that talked about the floating point, something which
something that sort of came out of the recesses of my memory. There was no
other explanation.

I split the journal entry into three and somehow the new combination of
numbers got rid of the phantom number way out there and they went through.

take a look here:

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/pennyoff.html

In article <[email protected]>,
"Kathleen Bell" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Years ago I heard about the way Excel stores numbers. I wrote it off as
> something accountants would never have to deal with since we weren't dealing
> with high precision numbers. Well...
>
> This past week I tried to upload a journal entry that had about 15K lines.
> The computer rejected it as not balancing. In the ninth and tenth decimal
> places there was a 15. We tried everything. It became a "class project".
> We tried rounding up, rounding down, just plain rounding, truncating. We
> copied as values, copied as text and then recopied as numbers. Finally we
> found a website that talked about the floating point, something which
> something that sort of came out of the recesses of my memory. There was no
> other explanation.
>
> I split the journal entry into three and somehow the new combination of
> numbers got rid of the phantom number way out there and they went through.

"Kathleen Bell" wrote:
> Finally we found a website that talked about the
> floating point, something which something that sort
> of came out of the recesses of my memory. There
> was no other explanation.
>
> I split the journal entry into three and somehow the
> new combination of numbers got rid of the phantom
> number way out there and they went through.

Do you have a question? Perhaps it would help to read
the following KB articles:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214118/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/78113/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/57298/en-us