AUTHOR'S  NOTES:

If you work for a larger institution with a diligent MIS department, these items should be well known and your auditors and analysts probably have the patches installed.   However, you may want to check with your MIS department just to be sure.  For the rest of the world, we hope this saves you some problems.

RECALCULATION  BUG  IN  EXCEL

Most of you should know by now that Microsoft hates to tell anyone that anything is wrong; just look at the 3000 bugs fixed from Windows-95 to Windows-98 (was Windows-95 a beta that we paid for?).  Excel has had several patches over the years, most notoriously, the OLE bug that caused links to get lost after files were saved.  Now, with Microsoft Office-97 in the marketplace, we have the dreaded "recalculation errors."  These bugs do not affect users of Office-95 and versions of Excel prior to Office-97.

What are the Bugs?
In brief, there are three possible errors:  (1) If you have partial recalculations turned on (that is, only changes are recalculated and not the whole spreadsheet), the math may not update certain cells in Office-97 versions of Excel Only.  (2) In some cases, graph data points will not update correctly.  (3) In some cases, linked formulas will not update correctly.

Solutions and Patches
The easiest solution is to recalculate the entire spreadsheet prior to printing (Ctrl+Alt+F9).   You could add a recalculate command to all print macros (assuming you know visual basic for applications).

This is the THIRD Excel patch for recalculation problems and if you fixed this from the 4/98 patch, there is yet another patch.  The version 3 patch replaces prior patches (Xl8p3.exe is launched from within Xl8patch.exe).

Here are our warnings about this patch.

1. Close ALL applications before running any patches.
   
   
2. You MUST first install Office Service Pack 1, available from Microsoft for free at:.
   http://officeupdate.microsoft.com
   This download can take about an hour with a regular modem.  Be patient.
   Do you have Service Pack-1 installed already?  Open Excel and select Help-About from the menubar at the top of the screen.  The version should say SR-1 at the top of the screen, otherwise, download SP-1 or SP-2.
   
   
3. Go to the Microsoft page below and see the upper left side of the resulting page for the patch-link:
   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7AEF1516-5D35-4E0B-B902-D91A1D2EB0F8&displaylang=en
   
   
4. Follow the directions that come with the recalculation patch exactly.
   
   
5. The bugs may still exist in a saved workbook after the patch is installed.   Therefore, users should open each workbook / spreadsheet and press Ctrl+Alt+F9 to force a full recalculation and then save the file with the new patch now executed.  Repeat for all files.

YEAR  2000  DATES  IN  EXCEL

Dates Entered Without Formulas (mm/dd/yy)
This Excel bug is a Y2K problem that appears simple, yet may require some rework to fix all of your spreadsheets.

In Excel 97 two-digit year numbers cause two-digit year dates from 20 to 29 to work differently in Excel 97 if dates are entered as mm/dd/yy (direct entry with slashes).

For example, if you type "10/15/22" (without quotations) in Excel 97, the date appears as 10/15/2022; in earlier versions of Microsoft Excel, the date appears as 10/15/1922.

Note: Microsoft Excel 2.x is even different.  In Microsoft Excel 2.x, there is no two-digit "boundary year" and all two-digit years are assumed to be in the 20th century.

Formula Driven Date Bugs in Excel-97 (=date(year,month,day)
The chart below shows the results of entering 1/1/00, versus =date(00,1,1), versus =date(2000,1,1).  The bug is clearly year 2000 driven and the 4 digit year is REQUIRED in the formula to fix dates after the year 2000 (but not before).  In short, if you are using =date(year,month,day) formulas, you have a problem if the year driving the formula is not 4 digits.

Date Migration Wizard
If you have Excel-97 and need to update older versions to the date formats in Excel-97, Microsoft has created a date migration wizard to help update older versions of Excel to the Office-97 date format.  You will still have a 4 digit year 2000 problem.   See this article from the Microsoft Knowledge Base
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q176/9/43.asp