MS08-014: Description of the security update for Excel 2003: March 11, 2008

• Home users:
  http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/updates/bulletins/200803.mspx (http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/updates/bulletins/200803.mspx)
  Skip the details: Download the updates for your home computer or laptop from the Microsoft Update Web site now:
  http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/ (http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/)
• IT professionals:
  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-014.mspx (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-014.mspx)

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Known issue with this security update

• You install security update 943985 on a computer that has Microsoft Office Excel 2003 installed. After you install the update, array-entered functions that contain a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro that refers to a Real Time Data source return an incorrect value. The incorrect value is usually 0.
  
  Microsoft has completed research about this issue and has re-released security update 943985 for users of Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2 and of Microsoft Office Excel Service Pack 3.
  
  Automatic Updates will correctly offer this update to these users regardless of whether the users have applied the original version of security update 943985.
  
  For more information about this issue and about how to determine which version of the update you have installed, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
  950340  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950340/ ) After you install security update 943985, Excel 2003 calculations return an incorrect result when a Real Time Data source is used in a user-defined Visual Basic for Applications function
• You may experience any of the following issues after you install security update 943985 on a computer that has Microsoft Office Excel 2003 installed.
  • You cannot import a text file by using the Text Import Wizard in Excel 2003.
  • You can no longer run VBA code that uses the Paste method in the Workbook_Open() function or in the Auto_Open() function to copy the text data to a specific cell in an Excel worksheet. When you double-click the Excel workbook to run the VBA code, the text data can be copied only to cell A1. The text data cannot be copied to the expected cell. Additionally, the first character of the text data is missing in cell A1.
  • When you open a file that uses ANSI encoding and that is in tab-delimited (*.txt) format, the East Asia characters in the file may not be displayed. For example, the East Asia characters can be Korean characters or Chinese characters.
  • You save an Excel worksheet in which a cell has multiple lines that are saved as a .txt file. However, when you use Excel 2003 to open the .txt file, the multiple lines that were previously in the cell may be separately displayed in multiple cells.
    
    Note If you want to add an additional line in a cell in Excel, press ALT+ENTER when you type the text in the cell.
  • The contents of the following files may be displayed incorrectly when you open the files in Excel 2003:
    • Tab-delimited (*.txt) files that use ANSI encoding
    • Comma-delimited (*.csv) files that use UTF-8 encoding
  To resolve these issues, install hotfix 952208. For more information about hotfix 952208, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
  952208  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952208/ ) Description of the Excel 2003 hotfix package: May 10, 2008

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Prerequisites

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Removal information

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