Excel Update Fails Maths

By Greg McNevin

March 18, 2008: Following an unfortunate incident with a flawed Vista update making its way onto Microsoft’s automatic update system, the company is again dealing with fallout from a dodgy update, only this time it’s Microsoft Excel that has been struck down.

A bug in last week’s MS08-014 security update has resulted in mathematical flaws being generated when some macros are run.

The issue affects some users working with Office Excel 2003, returning zeroes instead of the correct figures when real-time data is imported into spreadsheets.

In an update to its security bulletin, Microsoft says it is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. For now it recommends that users “perform additional testing before initiating a wide deployment of the update.”

Despite only affecting Office 2003, Service Pack 2 and earlier, Office 2003, Service Pack 3 users and later are still being pushed to install the update as “the update files for Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 are newer (with higher version numbers) than the files that are currently on your system,” and it also repairs a large security hole that surfaced in Excel in January, enabling hackers to exploit the software in online attacks.

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