Certain apps have certain ‘must-have’ features, for spreadsheet applications one would definitely be the ability to do math – unfortunately for Microsoft it appears the newest version of their industry-leading Excel 2007 application, can’t quite cut it with certain equations.

Microsoft has tried to explain their way out of this by saying that the program is actually doing the math correctly, it’s just not displaying it correctly on the screen – but really if the user can’t get the correct result does it matter? That kind of reminds me of the old ‘if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it actually fall?’

Microsoft is working on a fix right now, but this is pretty embarrassing and yet another PR win for competitors like Google Docs. Here’s an equation Excel should be able to handle: Excel 2007 retails for $230, subtract $230 from this and you get what Google Spreadsheets retails for…