September’s Excel 2013 ‘security’ update is more like a bug patch.
As usual, Microsoft has tried to bury the bug news by bundling the fixes with some vague ‘security’ issues. The documentation for the bug fixes is in KB3085502 which is misleadingly titled as a ‘Description of the security update for Excel 2013’.
One of the bug fixes (copying cells with Conditional Formatting) needs a registry change to work.
Some of the bugs aren’t that obscure. So we’re happy to give the bug fixes more prominence than Microsoft has:
- Consider the following scenario:
- You add an ActiveX combo box control or an ActiveX list box control to a workbook in Excel 2010.
- The ListFillRange property of the control refers to the data of another worksheet in the workbook.
- You zoom the views of both worksheets to different zoom factors other than 100%.
- You try to change the selection of the combo box control or the list box control.
In this scenario, you may receive the following error message:
Not enough system resources to display completely.
- Charts can’t be inserted in other Office applications such as Word or PowerPoint if an add-in from a network location is loaded in Excel 2013.
- Some object model calls (Range::HasArray, Range:HasFormula and Range::NumberFormat) are slower in Excel 2013 compared to earlier versions of Excel.
- When you use a third-party application to host Excel 2013 and try to use the application to open a workbook externally in an Excel window, the window opens without a workbook.
- When you enable the Always use connection file option for an ODBC connection to any data source such as Access or SQL server in Excel 2013, Excel 2013 may crash.
- Fixes an issue that hides detailed error message from the Power Query users in various scenarios and causes a generic error notification to be displayed instead.
- When you print or print preview a worksheet in Excel 2013, the name of a group box (form control) is displayed in an incorrect position.
- When you copy and paste cells that have conditional formatting set in Excel 2013, the conditional formatting rules are duplicated even though the rules already exist in the cells.
Note After you apply the update, you need to follow the instructions in the “Registry information” section to fix this issue. - Certain edits in PowerPivot will cause Power Query connections to be read-only in Excel and block further edits in Power Query. For more information, see Editing columns and tables from a Power Query connection is no longer possible by using PowerPivot in Excel 2013.
- Sometimes you receive an out of memory error when you create a new Excel window after using an Excel preview window in Outlook.
