It appears to relate to the fact that your return is less than your
investment. I am not an accountant, but I would think that descibing a loss
as a negative return would be more useful than simply reporting that you
didn't make any money. Excel 2007 converted ATP functions to worksheet
functions; it would be interesting to know if it also changed this behavior.

Jerry

"Howard Kaikow" wrote:

"Jerry W. Lewis" wrote in message
...
What do you get for =COUNT(B3:B56, A3:A56)? Since you seem to agree with
all
other XIRR results, my guess is that in this case your "numbers" are text
instead of numbers, and therefore are ignored by the formula.

If COUNT returns 108, then you need to post the data before anyone can
comment intelligently.

I've eliminated the empty rows and posted a watered down version of the file
at
http://www.standards.com/temp/excel2003.xls.

Prior to 2007, XIRR was not a native Excel function. To use it, you had
to
link in the Analysis ToolPak Add-In (ATPVBAEN.XLA). XIRR is a native
function in OpenOffice Calc, which cannot use the ATP add-in, hence the
perfectly predictable behavior that you describe between the two packages.

Ayup, I knew that.
Calc returns the plausible value of -9.384% instead of 0.

A few months ago, I posted a related issue in one of these newsgroups.
In that case, all I had to do was break the links (affected only 2 cells)
and re-enter the XIRR formulae. That solution does not work here.