Obviously not whining students. Apparently you've failed to learn two very
basic lessons from this: 1) read the fine print; 2) take responsibility for
your own intellectual laziness. Based on your current trajectory, your
future prospects don't look bright.

Harlan, is your mission in life to demonstrate the ultimate in rude behavior
on this forum? You are worse than hopeless.

"Harlan Grove" wrote:

"Briana" wrote...
It doesn't matter if the fact that the formula is incorrect is documented
in the excel book or not. Who reads that? . . .

Obviously not whining students. Apparently you've failed to learn two very
basic lessons from this: 1) read the fine print; 2) take responsibility for
your own intellectual laziness. Based on your current trajectory, your
future prospects don't look bright.

. . . People who don't know how to use
excel. Finance classes all over the country care coming up with two
different NPV numbers for their capital projects, one frmo their $29
trusty calculator of less than 1 pound in weight, and an incorrect
answer from a $100 computer program. . . .

True, but that's how *ALL* spreadsheets work. They ALL have technically
incorrect NPV functions (as NPV was a term in wide-spread use in finance and
economics prior to the advent of elecronic spreadsheets, and finance texts
always have NPV calcs begin at time zero, one does have to admit that
spreadsheets, including Excel, screwed this up). Most of them also treat
1900 as a leap year. Get used to it. Learn the shortcomings of your tools,
and work around them as many, many others have already learned to do.

. . . NPV should be changed to have an option for a year 0
cash outflow. If not, then Microsoft does not care about having accurate
programs, and we should question every other formula also(Yes, MIRR also
has the same problem.)

You've almost discovered an obvious truth. Microsoft really doesn't care how
accurate Excel is. It took over a decade of complaining to get decent
continuous distribution and regression functions. There were no simple
work-arounds for those as there are for NPV, so Microsoft had to fix them.

As for adding options to existing functions, flip that around - you could
write your own 'corrected' NPV function in VBA. You wouldn't be the first to
write your own replacements for flawed built-in 'functionality'.

I am a finance student, and for the last year, my classmates and I have
argued with professors to accept two numbers for each NPV calculation.

Meaning your grades have suffered because you haven't checked the specs for
the software you've been using? Tough. If you had been doing engineering
coursework and just assumed certain measurements were in mks units rather
than cgs units because your textbook always used mks, and thus got wrong
answers, your grade would also rightly suffer.

Never assume you know how a piece of software works until you either read
the manual or run some test calculations. Failure to do either deserves to
be recognized as FAILURE.

Can't we just correct it?

No because fixing it for you would break existing workbooks used by others.

Your ONLY choice is between learning how to use Excel (warts & all) or using
something else (but you'll have the same problem with any other spreadsheet
unless you modify some open source one to suit your needs).