Excel update may lead to wrong answers

Stephen Withers
Monday, 17 March 2008 06:13

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft has warned that a recent patch for an Excel security issue may result in incorrect results for some calculations.

Last week, Microsoft released an update for multiple versions of Excel to address a number of vulnerabilities that could result in remote code execution when a maliciously crafted spreadsheet is opened.

The company subsequently warned users of Excel 2003 SP2 and SP3 that the update can cause Excel calculations to return an incorrect result (usually 0) from array-entered user-defined Visual Basic for Applications functions that refer to a Real Time Data source.

A workaround for the problem is to run the function on individual cells, not on an array of cells.

According to Bill Sisk, security response communications manager at Microsoft, "Our teams are testing a fix and will release it once it meets our quality bar for broad distribution."