By MICHAEL FOREMAN
Auckland-based printed circuit board contractor Alan Zhang thought he was the first in the world to discover a Y2K bug in Microsoft's Office 2000, when he noticed a strange effect in his Excel spreadsheet last week.
He found that when he formatted any short number in a cell as a date, the formula bar at the top of the program showed a date in 1900.
He tried the same thing with an Office 97 version of Excel and got the same result, leading him to believe that the "bug" had been inherited from an earlier release of the program.
"Whatever shows in the formula bar shows what the program is thinking, so it could alter the processing of a date," said Mr Zhang.
Several internet searches and a perusal of Microsoft's web site and an Excel-related newsgroup failed to find any reference to this phenomenon.
Mr Zhang contacted the Business Herald and, following his instructions, we managed to replicate the 1900 date on two other PCs. However a call to Microsoft abruptly halted what turned out to be an erroneous bug report.
Technical account manager Brett Williams said "the program is simply doing what it is supposed to."
By convention, spreadsheet programs such as Excel assign a number to each day beginning with January 1, 1900. So the number 1 will be converted to that date, the number 27 will yield January 27 1900, while the number 35626 equates to January 1, 2000.
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