ot: dropping zeros - not the same

[Fairlight]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 05:12:54PM -0500, Richard Kreiss, the prominent pundit,
witicized:
> One of my client's called and advised they are having trouble with an Excel
> spreadsheet which lists their credits.  It appears that when the service
> company transmits this to their customer in about 20% of credits loose a
> zero.
> 
> Here is the odd part: -88.70 is received as -8.87
> 
> As was indicated to me, this only happens when the hundredths value is a
> zero.
> 
> Any idea why this happening.  There service company has no idea.  The sheet
> looks correct prior to e-mailing it to the service company.

Is the sheet beeing assembled on your end, or on the remote end?  (ie.,
into fP or out of fP?)

At any rate, that sounds suspiciously like an Excel bug, or a bug in the
converter being used.  It shouldn't even matter what precision is used, the
decimal place is being -shifted-, which is flat-out unacceptable.

What's doing the conversion?  A third party program, or Excel itself?

mark->