Discovered quirks

Every case below is a real, executed formula whose result did not match Excel’s documented/expected behavior. This is the flagship content of Can I Spreadsheet?: cross-engine divergence that only shows up when you actually run the formula. All three executed engines are represented — LibreOffice Calc 25.8.7.3, Google Sheets (Drive import, 2026-09-01) and Excel for the web (recalc, 2026-09-01) — each measured against Microsoft’s documentation for desktop Excel. We do not run desktop Excel, so nothing in the “documented / expected” column is a measurement.

What an Excel-for-the-web row means, and what it does not. Excel for the web is a separate implementation of the calculation engine from the desktop product, and we have no desktop run to set beside it. So a row badged Excel for the web asserts exactly one thing: the web engine’s executed result disagreed with Microsoft’s documentation for desktop Excel. It is evidence about the web engine and about nothing else. The disagreement may be a genuine web-versus-desktop difference, or it may be a documentation gap that affects both products — this page does not decide which, and the badge should not be read as deciding it either.

For the other question — where the three engines we execute disagree with each other, with no documentation involved and no error to warn anyone — see silent divergences.

1194 quirks found across 280 functions (617 in LibreOffice, 290 in Google Sheets, 287 in Excel for the web). A further 9 Google Sheets cases are excluded as inconclusive — explained by the .xlsx import/export round trip, not by Sheets. 7 Excel-for-the-web cases are excluded for the same class of reason on its own transport — the OneDrive round trip deleted a LAMBDA-bearing formula outright, or turned an INDIRECT into an unresolved external-workbook link — so the value that came back measures the trip, not the function. A further 7 functions never reached the web engine at all: its file-open refuses any workbook whose stored formulas carry the LAMBDA-family serialization, so those functions carry no Excel-for-the-web verdict and can hold no Excel-for-the-web quirk. See Coverage. 47 further executed cases are excluded because the function’s documented behaviour needs something no test workbook can supply — an external data server, a live fetch, another user’s authorization. Those results are published on their own pages with the reason; none of them is a quirk, because none of them is a statement about the engine. See Coverage.

Deep dives: formulas that behave differently