A few years back, people were rather disturbed to find out about the famous Excel bug, whereby the multiplication of two numbers in Microsoft‘s spreadsheet gave the wrong number. It turns out there are other circumstances in which Excel (and, to be fair, presumably other spreadsheets) can give incorrect results, but they are unlikely to be encountered in typical everyday tasks. However, in the specialized world of bioinformatics, which uses computers to analyze data about genes and related areas, careless use of spreadsheets can throw up a significant numbers of errors, as this paper in BMC Bioinformatics explains: