Silent divergences: formulas that return different values in Excel for the web, Google Sheets and LibreOffice — no error, just a different number

A silent divergence is the expensive kind. All three of the engines this harness runs — Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc 25.8.7.3 and Excel for the web — returned an ordinary value for the same formula. Nobody returned #NAME?, #VALUE! or any other error. And the values are different. Nothing on screen says so: the cell just holds a different number, or a string of a different length, than it held in the application the workbook came from.

This is not the quirks list. The quirks catalog asks whether one executed engine matches Microsoft’s documented behaviour for the desktop product — documentation on one side, measurement on the other. This page consults no documentation at all. Every row here is measurement against measurement: three executed engines, one formula, three values that do not agree. A formula can appear on both pages, on one, or on neither.

55 silent divergences across 42 functions: 4 — All three differ; 18 — Google Sheets differs; 14 — LibreOffice differs; 19 — Excel for the web differs.

Where each column comes from

• Google Sheets — our Drive-import run. The small date under each value is that function’s own executed_at, not the results file’s timestamp, so a function re-run later carries a later date than its neighbours.
• LibreOffice Calc 25.8.7.3 — the pinned build, recalculated headlessly. The same cases also ran on 24.2.0.3, 24.8.7.2, 25.2.0.3, and the column says whether all 4 builds returned the same value. All of them agreeing means settled behaviour; builds disagreeing means you are looking at a version difference, and the differing builds and their values are printed.
• Excel for the web — our dated run: the workbook is uploaded to OneDrive with no cached results, Excel for the web recalculates it on open, and the computed values are downloaded back out (2026-09-01).
• Desktop Excel is absent from this page, because it is executed nowhere on this site. We do not run desktop Excel. Elsewhere it appears only as Microsoft’s documentation, and documentation is not a measurement, so it has no column here. Excel for the web is a separate application with its own calculation engine: a value in its column is evidence about the web engine and about nothing else.

Every value above was read back out of a recalculated workbook by our harness; the raw runs are in the repository and the method is on the methodology page. For the catalog of cases measured against Microsoft’s documentation instead, see the quirks list; for long-form writeups of individual cases, see the formula behavior guides.