Microsoft patch mashes Office forms and macros Microsoft's December patching palaver keeps getting worse, with news that one of this month's brood is breaking Excel macros. Redmond's already had to back-pedal on the December 2014 update for Windows Root Certificate Program in Windows and also this month pulled a faulty Exchange update. Now comes news that MS14-082, one of …
Same old, same old, the Users to the testing for MS because they can bothered to do it themselves.
not that they are immune here but it does seem that patch cockups are happening more and more often with stuff coming out of Redmond.
now time to go and do my crimble shopping. Cash only this year coz a %$£$$%^&*%$$!!!!! cloned one of my cards.
All possible scenarios are too many to reasonably test.
However it looks as though this comes down to software version control. MS really should have nailed that. I remember having $APP/lib directories under *nix which seems to me to be the right way to go. That can be a symlink to an older version of code if required.
How about Office for Mac having some imaginary dependency on Firefox and Safari.? Updates refuse to install if Firefox and/or Safari is running. Sloppy really Sloppy on the part of Microsoft.
Don't know about those two versions installed. I have 2003 and 2007 on my Laptop. At least I can do most of my documentation work without that silly ribbon. 2007 is only used where I have to output in .docx format.
Is that like how you CAN'T be bothered to DO your proof-reading of your posts. If you're going to complain about people not checking stuff then check your own stuff.
Or perhaps in both cases it was checked, but by humans who are fallible and miss stuff despite their best intentions?
No, safer to update manually, when all the lemmings have gone and reported broken features and fixes have been made.
Of course, it's still a risk, because you never know if Yet Another Bug is going to crop up in reports while you're patching, or if you're a special case and some new bug rears its head.
But it is still better than rushing to patch a running system, running headfirst into problems and having to wait for MS to do a rush job only to find that either it doesn't fix the problem and/or it breaks something else.
I was about to add "because done too quickly" but MS has already failed patches it had ample time to create, so best leave it out.
<i>Could this perception be related to the recent redundancies at Redmond, which I understand from one of the softie blogs, fell mainly among testing teams?</i>
Interesting. Whatever the reason, this is how it used to be a decade or more ago. And despite the occasional comment about update issues that were so rare as to seem the exception that proved the rule, Microsoft seemed to have cracked this. Like with blue screens. I have run multiple versions of Windows all this time and had long got used to issues with updates and BSODs being a thing of the past. In all that time it has seemed Microsoft had made Windows all but unfailingly reliable. Then iPhones and tablets came into the ascendency and they got scared. And history begins to repeat itself. Not enough people with any authority at Microsoft now who were there in the 9x days?
The fundamental problem for MS and most other technology vendors is that market forces - yes that's (most of) us - demand continual "innovation" and change, in preference to making what has already been released function correctly and dependably.
Equally, "decision makers" are all too often persuaded by our industry that replacing systems that have been refined over many years, and reimplementing them from scratch, is a universal panacea for IT woes. This approach may eliminate some old bugs but, with prevalent design techniques, will inevitably introduce new ones.
Recent events should remind us that systems developed using current approaches are just not suitable for society's rapidly increasing dependance on ICT.
I can see multiple versions MS Office being installed on a computer because of MS file compatibility issues. So to me this would be an obvious test case and fairly easy one to implement with VM with one OS image with each pair of versions installed.
The problem is number that are getting yanked and the damage they tend to do. Continually, screwing up Patch Tuesday will eventually be noticed and some people and companies will migrate away from MS and never return.
True. having multiple versions of Office installed at the same time is not the 'normal" situation, or a situation that MS encouraged in the past. BUT, that is changing.
It was a more valid assumption when MS sold discounted "upgrade" licenses that required you to uninstall the "old" / "upgrade from" version. But since the beancounters decided to do the money grab and discontinued the upgrade license in Office 2013 it is becoming more possible.
As well, after trying 2013 and finding the blinding white user interface not user friendly, many people have gone back to their earlier version.
True, MS does not encourage installing multiple versions, but they have had the registry hack in place since the 1980's.
By the way, I have Office 2003, 2007, 2010 AND 2013 ALL running on my Windows 8.0 computer. It is easy, with a couple of adaptations, a simple registry hack to add the NoReReg registry key, and creating separate version specific template folders.
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