What follows is a quote from a very reliable newsletter called Woody's Office Watch. This is a real problem that anyone using Excel 2003 needs to be aware of. The problem also affects RANDBETWEEN(). It does not affect earlier versions of Excel.
Ronny Richardson "If you have a spreadsheet that uses the RAND() function, and you�re using Excel 2003, you may be getting bad results � and you probably don�t even know it. Excel 2003�s RAND() has a big, big bug in it. In short, RAND() should produce a pseudo-random number between 0 and 1. Microsoft reworked the function for Excel 2003 so it would be more random, especially when you ask for many random numbers. Guess what? If you do try to get a lot of random numbers, the function starts returning negative numbers. More than that, the negative numbers aren't anywhere near 'random'. And to top it all off, Microsoft has been told about the problem and has done nothing. Like serious Excel problems in the past, this new bug has been ignored." . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
