GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 640571
Engineering format sometimes displays wrong values
Last modified: 2011-01-26 18:54:00 UTC
Created attachment 179314 [details] Excel 2007 Engineering Format Examples Using # Formatting In excel you can use the # formatting character to obtain engineering format, where everything is displayed in a power of 3. In an example excel test sheet Gnumeric did not get the formatting in all cases, in some cells it incorrectly displayed powers of 5 and 7. Note that in the example spreadsheet two columns towards the right are not supposed to be in powers of three, they were just showing that the # format character could be used to display in powers of other than 3. Hopefully I will be able to attach the example excel spreadsheet and pdfs showing the corresponding display output in Excel and gnumeric.
Created attachment 179315 [details] Excel output display of "excel_engineering_notation_examples.xlsx"
Created attachment 179316 [details] Gnumeric output display of "excel_engineering_notation_examples.xlsx"
What cell do you want me to look at? What do you see in the cell? What do you expect?
Morten, have a look in the 4th column in the 7th cell from the bottom. The number should be in format ##0.0E+00 but contains "99.9E-07". In engineering format the exponent should never be 7. The exponents should always be multiples of 3. On this example page quite a few of the exponents are not multiples of 3.
You can easily create this yourself. Enter "9.999E-6" in cell A1. Format it with 2 decimals in scientifc notation checking the "engineering" notation checkbox. You see 99.99E-07 when it should be "10.00E-06".
Ok, that is seriously *wrong*. (But at least we seem to display something that has the right value.)
Thanks for the feedback, just to re-emphasize one point: Note that in the example spreadsheet two columns towards the right are not supposed to be in powers of three, they were just showing that the # format character could be used to display in powers of other than 3. Rather than list all of the cells I thought were incorrect, I thought by supplying a pdf of the view in excel and the view in gnumeric you can then see for yourself and decide whether you believed the fault was with excel or gnumeric. I realized afterwards that my example sheet did not contain any negative numbers, ie -10, -1e6, -100e6 etc
This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. Thank you for your bug report.