More details on the ‘request’ to update Excel after Microsoft lost a patent suit.
(You’ll find lots of missing information in this article – we have asked many questions of Microsoft on this matter and received only short, ambiguous and incomplete responses.)
Back in June 2005 Microsoft lost one part of a jury trial on a patent case involving the way Excel and Access communicate with each other. Only one of nine issues was accepted by the jury and as a result Microsoft was ordered to pay damages of around US$9M. That amount is trivial to Microsoft and was subject to adjustment on the inevitable appeals.
The problem arises because Microsoft had to remove that technology from both Excel & Access 2002 (XP) plus Excel & Access 2003. This was done in Office 2003 Service Pack 2 and in a small update to Access 2002 released last October.
For some reason, unexplained by Microsoft, this has now become more important and they are now saying that new installations of these products must include the updated versions (ie the ones without the disputed technology).
The public explanations from Microsoft aren’t very clear at all and leave many questions unanswered. We’ve already received hundreds of questions from Office customers about this and will continue to pursue Microsoft – who would be best served by full disclosure.
But these facts we’ve been able to establish:
- This demand comes from Microsoft not the patent holder.
- It applies only to NEW installations of the affected products – existing versions of Office XP / Office 2003 can remain as is.
- Microsoft is implying that only multi-license customers are affected – though at what point a license holder has enough copies of Office to be affected has not been disclosed.
- There’s no specific deadline for the changeover. The Microsoft license requires a change ‘immediately’.
Microsoft is saying, as usual, that only a ‘small percentage’ of customers are affected. That may be true, but that fraction of corporate customers probably represents many thousands of individual computers.
What’s also not stated is that the update removes an important feature for many Excel and Access users – this is not a minor technical or legalistic change. Before complying with Microsoft’s demand you need to check the effect on your existing systems.
The Patent Change
The cause of the problem is a feature between Excel and Access. You can link an Access database to an Excel worksheet in such a way that you can edit the data in the database, and those changes will appear in the worksheet.
The result of all these legal actions is that Microsoft has to withdraw that specific feature from Office.
Once you’ve installed Office 2003 Service Pack 2 or the Access 2002 patch you can’t change Access data and have it appear in a linked Excel table.
According to Microsoft, the reverse linkage is still available – you can edit an Excel linked table in Excel and have those changes appear in the database.
Details at https://office-watch.com/kb?904953
The Patent Update
The updates involved are not new, but Microsoft hasn’t explained why these existing updates have now become mandatory when they have been available for some months.
For Access 2003 the feature was removed in Office 2003 Service Pack 2.
For Access 2002 (XP) there is a specific patch available at https://office-watch.com/kb?904018
The Patent Workaround
Microsoft suggests two different workarounds:
- Open the workbook, make the changes then save the changes and close the workbook, or
- Import the workbook into Access, make the changes then export back to an .xls file.
It would seem there’s another alternative. Change your system so that all data changes are made via Excel to the Access database and not the other way around. This would be a major revision.
We suggest that you only take action if you are specifically approached by Microsoft. Microsoft says that they are contacting customers, which appears to mean any organization with large deployments of Office.
As we note at the beginning, Microsoft has chosen not to openly talk about this change for whatever reason. The result, I’m sure, will be company staffers complaining about Office Watch coverage yet again, when all that was necessary was a more open approach by Redmond.
