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MS Excel tries to be clever and disguise the most common places this is noticed.

Give it =0.1+0.2-0.3 and it will see what you are trying to do and return 0.

Give it anything slightly more complicated such as =(0.1+0.2-0.3) and this won't trip, in this example displaying 5.55112E-17 or similar.



Are you sure it is not showing the exact answer because the the the cell precision set to a single decimal digit?


Yup: https://i.imgur.com/VuawaE1.png, on Excel v1911 (Build 12228.20332).


Kahan (architect of IEEE 754) has a nice rant on it:

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mind1ess.pdf

(and plenty of other rants...:

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ )




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