Microsoft fixes the fix that broke Excel paste – partly

Microsoft has issued a partial fix for the Excel bug that causes paste operations to fail. The hotfix applies only to Excel 2016, and Microsoft warns that pasting may still fail in workbooks containing conditional formatting. Earlier in September, Microsoft released a security update for Excel to address remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. It later acknowledged that the update had introduced another problem: "In Microsoft Excel 2024, 2021, 2019, and 2016, the paste operation might fail silently. "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message." Some users could work around the problem with Paste Special, but others had to wait for Microsoft to act. A fix has now arrived - for Excel 2016 only - and it continues to hover rather nervously in the doorway. September has not been kind to Microsoft, its updates, or the emergency updates needed to repair them. The September Windows security update required an out-of-band release to address several problems, but even that left some work unfinished. Certain USB audio devices, for example, could remain silent after the emergency update. Microsoft has since added another problem involving domain-joined devices to its known issues list. While users of newer Excel releases continue to wait, Microsoft has at least repaired another problem introduced by an August update. A bug that caused Windows Security to incorrectly report that Microsoft Defender Antivirus was disabled was resolved in a Defender update released on September 17. Kudos to the team, although the best fix remains not breaking things in the first place. (R)