Financial/Scientific Calculations in Excel

Question

I was wondering how large financial or (mainly) scientific calculations would be done in Excel, given that it uses floating point numbers/calculations. For example, if there was a calculation such as:

12457584x10^14 * 0.000293749930049847

In this case, is there an Excel plug-in or something that can help to support these calculations, or do people just not do scientific (or very large financial) calculations in Excel for this reason? If so, are there any "spreadsheet-type programs" that are better suited for this purpose?

Answer 1

If you want to continue to use Excel and don't mind programming in VBA, you can make use of the VBA Decimal data type which has, I believe, 28-digit precision. Of course, if you enter those values into an Excel cell, you must enter them as strings, since Excel itself only shows 15-digit precision. Using VBA, the value of your calculation is: 365941442859009318.9648 There is also an xNumbers add-in for Excel which is presently unsupported, but still usable and findable with an internet search, and allows even higher levels of precision.