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The result, which should be 65,535, was instead returned as 100,000 and occurred in a number of other variants of the equation.

The fix can be downloaded independently, however, Microsoft will also be pushing it through the Microsoft Update service and bundling it into the first service pack for Office 2007.

"We're not planning to share details on this beyond what we've already communicated - i.e. that the issue occurred in formatting of floating point numbers near 65,565 and 65,536," says a spokesperson for the company.

He did admit however, "it was code that we introduced as part of the calculation overhaul that we did for Excel 2007."