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Office 2003 Patches - February 2004

Piecemeal Office 2003 patches continue to roll in at a breathtaking pace.

Piecemeal Office 2003 patches continue to roll in at a breathtaking pace. In addition to the Excel 2003 RAND() function patch that you have to beg for, there’s a raft of Word 2003 patches, all bundled into one file.

The Word 2003 patch fixes nearly a dozen different bugs, detailed in this Knowledge Base article. The KB article advises “Under certain circumstances Word 2003 can become unresponsive when the user saves a file or when Word automatically saves an AutoRecover file.” But there are no details, anywhere, about any AutoRecover problem.

On the other hand, there are almost a dozen bugs that are documented in the KB article. Among them is a bug that I’ve hit in all versions of Word for many, many years. Microsoft describes it thusly:

“Text may be missing when you view a Word document in different views or when you scroll through the document / When you change views or you scroll through the Word document, text that should appear on the last line of a page may jump to the next page, may jump back to the previous page, or may intermittently not show on either page.”

There are a handful of bugs in the {NUMPAGES} field in Word 2003 that came as a surprise to me. There’s a bug (er, yet another bug) in Track Changes that appears if someone edits a document on a Mac. And the Knowledge Base article lists dozens and dozens of general protection faults.

In addition, the Italian version of Visio 2003 goes belly up in certain circumstances when you try to print. Details here.

The best way to update: start your favorite Office app and click Help | Check for Updates. Once you’re on the Office Update web page (which only mentions updates once, but includes oodles and oodles of, uh, marvelous opportunities for you to spend more money on Office), click Check for Updates. Or you can download a patch file and apply it to all of your PCs, by going to the Knowledge Base article referenced.

 

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