I have recently been doing some work on a particular type of prime in Excel
when I ran into a problem with the worksheet POWER function. It became
obvious that at least on my machine there appears to be a rounding problem
with some of the calculations. I have a couple of machines and repeated it on
a second machine with Office 2003, with the same result. (The first machine
had an earlier version of Excel.) The simplest form of the calculation is
demonstrated by performing the following in a cell €˜=Power(100001,3) the
result seems to suggest that 1 x 1 = 0, The last digit being zero and not
one. I repeated the calculation with the more straightforward
€˜=sum(100001*100001*100001) with the same disconcerting result. (You can
check these calculations with the desktop calculator.) Do I need a fix or is
there some explanation for these results. I have found similar errors with
more demanding calculations and the work I am doing is grinding to a halt. I
am in the curious situation that most of my work I am now doing in Excel is
done with me doing the calculations manually to ensure the result is correct!
Yet in the documentation it is suggested that Excel can perform calculations
of the order of 1 * 10 to the power 307. (Note that all the calculations
are performed with and displayed as numbers, I do not represent anything as
floating point because it is the numbers and their properties that I am
interested in.) Can somebody help!