Sometimes Office Service Packs add bugs as well as fixing them.
The assumption by Microsoft and the hope of Office customers is that Service Packs for Microsoft Office will fix bugs on the software. Some of those bugs have been disclosed by Microsoft, others they’ve kept secret from customers.
Problem is, Service Packs are really complicated. So complicated that while fixing bugs, others can be created.
Here’s an example of a bug added by a Service Pack.
Admittedly an obscure bug but a typical example of a bug made by Microsoft but then kept secret by Microsoft. You won’t find this bug mentioned in the public Microsoft Knowledge Base, leaving customers to find out and workaround it themselves.
The troublemaker, in this case, is Office 2010 Service Pack 2 and is known to appear in the Brazilian Portuguese edition, maybe others.
Word 2010 SP2, in some languages, inserts the wrong day name.
“… it inserts a wrong date (INSERT > Date and Time>
In this example, on the left is Word 2013 which inserts the date 16 March 2014 with the correct day name in both Portuguese (domingo) and English (Sunday). On the right is Word 2010 SP2 where the same date is inserted correctly but the Portuguese day name is wrong (segunda-feira).
It’s a very curious bug. Microsoft Office is supposed to have ‘common code’ where language elements are plug-ins, so it’s hard to understand how changing language would affect the inserted date. Perhaps the day labels for Portuguese are in the wrong order?
Microsoft was informed of the bug and did nothing until Word 2013 when, like magic, the bug was fixed. Word 2010 users were left ‘in the dark’ to figure it out for themselves.
Office-Watch has not been able to verify this bug. We’re obliged to ‘Alexandre’ for this cautionary tale about Office Service Packs.
