Windows 7 64 bit experiences, my current software stack and that pesky CSC folder

September 24, 2009 1 Comment

Recently, like many others, I have been through the process of installing various releases of Windows 7, from the Beta, through RC1 and finally the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version. I decided to take the plunge and install 64 bit on my Dell D620 and everything went really well, no driver issues or any other hiccups. Had to do a manual download of a driver for my old(ish) Epson scanner, but it still installed straight off first time. RC1 needed a bit of manual intervention to get the NVidia drivers working for some reason (Beta and RTM both just worked, strangely), and it was a bit temperamental with docking and undocking while running, but RTM seems to have cleared this up, and is now way more stable than Vista ever was at doing this (I used to get a full system lock about 1 time in 10).

I did as advised by Microsoft and did this as a clean install every time, rather than doing a hack to allow me to run an in-place upgrade. Thanks to James O’Neill’s blog article I did this from a bootable USB drive, and this was lightning fast since I also recently upgraded my hard drive to a 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD.

Applications, applications, applications

A bit of a pain re-installing applications again each time round, but it does mean I have a nice shortlist of the apps and utilities that I actually need and use regularly enough to merit an install. Without being an exhaustive list, the apps that made the grade every time, in approximately the order they got installed are:

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Filed under Office 2010, Utilities + Tools, Windows 7 Tagged with , , ,

Excel 2010 new features – Sparklines

July 20, 2009 3 Comments

As discussed previously, we have some marketing information about what we will be seeing in the next release of the Office system, but not really a great deal of technical information. The Excel team are starting to blog a bit more now that the Technical Preview is underway; their 10,000 foot view is a good starting point to find out what’s coming, or you can read the press release. On the official Office 2010 site there is a video by Albert Chew, Product Manager for Office, which shows off some of the new features of Excel 2010 (sorry, no direct link to the video available, it’s linked in the menu on the left of that page). On the Microsoft PressPass videos page there is an Excel 2010 demo video which you can also download (16MB wmv file). This covers two new features – sparklines (from the start) and slicers (from about 1min 55 into the video)

As more information emerges, I’ll write in more detail about some of the new features. Today let’s have a look at probably the most eagerly awaited extension to Excel’s data visualisation capabilities – sparklines.

Sparklines in Excel 2010

Sparklines are very dense microcharts used to display simple information, usually showing historical values to give context to the current data. The term was coined by information visualisation guru Edward Tufte and discussed in a whole chapter in his book Beautiful Evidence, which describes sparklines as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”.

Examples might include past share values, commodity prices, exchange rates, or internal business key performance indicators. Lines may have key points highlighted (high value, low value, last value), show a trendline or normal band, but otherwise will be deliberately uncluttered to aid easy interpretation.

Typical sparkline sales versus targetThe example to the right shows the previous 12 months sales and target, with the highest and lowest sales figures highlighted. Some people might prefer to show the figures to the right of the sparkline as they relates to the final data point and therefore the right hand end of the plotted line, but this is a matter of personal preference. Although this example is show here in quite a large screenshot, the trend is very clear at much smaller sizes too.

While lines are by far the most common choice for sparklines, especially to show changes over time, other formats may be found – columns to show breakdown of a total by category for comparison, for example. Another popular use is to track success and failure, such as wins and losses for a sports team, a technique described well by this article on sparklines at Bissantz, the creators of SparkMaker, an add-in for Excel.

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Filed under Excel, Office 2010 Tagged with , , ,

Office 2010 first thoughts

July 19, 2009 1 Comment

Well, there’s some information finally coming out about Office 2010 and some of the features we will hopefully be seeing in the final release version next year. As the Technical Preview gets released to an invited audience only at this stage, there aren’t loads of sources of details, but a few places are showing off some interesting ideas and if you watch the videos carefully and look closely at the screenshots there are nuggets to be found.

If you want to be considered for the technical preview yourself, you can still sign up via the “Get a pass” link on the main “launch” site at Office 2010 – the movie. This site started out just hosting a teaser movie but now has a look and feel similar to the new “Backstage” interface which has been added to the Fluent UI to replace the current Office button menu to help you work with different aspects of your document in one place. There are a few videos posted on there right now, no doubt more to come soon.

Where can I find out more?

There are some useful overview documents on the Microsoft PressPass site, including an Office 2010 FAQ which covers a number of things, notably an outline of which products will be included in which versions of the suites available through retail or volume licensing. The oddest thing is that the various press releases available here are all Word .doc documents. Not a universal format like PDF. Not even Microsoft’s own portable format XPS. Not Word 2007 DOCX (probably a good idea not to assume people would already be on board with that, even with the compatibility pack for older versions). Other documents linked from that page give more detail for each of the products individually, but only at a brief marketing level, nothing too technical.

What are the biggest changes?

The most obvious change across the Office system as whole is that all the applications will now have the fluent UI and ribbon, which has also had slight facelift – they have removed many of the borders round buttons, reducing the visual clutter and “flattening” the overall effect (almost exactly what they did in the evolution of the toolbar from Office 97 to 2000). Selected or active options still appear to have borders to make them clearer. When you have additional context-sensitive tabs appearing in the Ribbon, the coloured highlight above them seems to be bolder because it extends from a solid colour at the top of the title bar fading out as it goes down into the Ribbon tabs area, rather than at the moment where this is only visible in the title bar area and fades quickly upwards. This may make the additional tools more obvious to new users when they need them, and help distinguish between similar items by getting used to the colours used.

The other big news items are the introduction of browser-based document viewing and editing (discussed below), and the availability of a 64-bit version of all the products (as well as 32 bit for legacy compatibility). This may provide some speed and productivity benefits to those who have appropriate hardware and OS to take advantage of this, use more memory and so on. Larger Access models might make more sense, but Excel spreadsheets of over 2GB? Hopefully not too often. I do know some people who could probably build PowerPoint shows that big though…

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Filed under Office 2010, Office System Tagged with , , , ,

Is the Office button a menu or a dialog box?

July 9, 2009 2 Comments

Another of Simon’s excellent posts about the Ribbon and other parts of the Fluent UI in Excel 2007 has prompted me to respond. Read the ribbon file blunderfest, where Simon says (I snipped a few bits out here for brevity, and the bold is mine):

I already mentioned the lack of file open icon, and previously I have talked about the ridiculous blob. And the initial flashing they had to incorporate to tell us its a button. But when you actually get closer it just gets sillier – I really wouldn’t have thought that was possible!

When you click and look, if you decide to cancel and move to the traditional cancel location (lower right) and click that button, does it close the file open dialog/ribbon? Or does it close Excel?

Everyone I have asked (and me) has accidentally closed Excel numerous times before eventually learning that this particular piece of the interface is not ‘normal’. In fact to cancel that thing you click anywhere else in Excel – and Excel ignores the click but closes the dialog! How ridiculous is that?

They have created a thing that is not as powerful or controllable as a dialog, but is too big and intrusive to be a menu or toolbar so they butchered an existing UI concept – the click away to cancel menu concept to work with this quasi dialog. But dialogs never worked like that before or in other applications. So now Office is the most friction-full application in the widows world (excluding perhaps Ulead products).

So, does the Office button bring up a (poor) dialog, or is it just a menu?

Sorry Simon but I have to disagree with you on this one (I seem to recall being told I was the voice of balance on smurfonspreadsheets by someone…).

Just because you think it’s a dialogue and call it a dialogue does not mean it is a dialog or should behave like one. Shredding a straw man / ribbon does not make a valid argument. To me it looks and behaves pretty much like I would expect a menu to behave:

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Filed under Excel, Office System Tagged with , , ,

Excel cell styles – useful feature or waste of ribbon space?

July 3, 2009 6 Comments

I agree with Simon in his article about the usefulness of cell styles in Excel, where he says:

Styles in Excel are one of those things that sound good in theory, but are significantly worse than useless in reality. In an isolated world they may work but as soon as you start copying a pasting between workbooks…then you get a right royal style mess.

Cell styles as a concept seem pretty weak to me. The built-in ones are hopeless; I know hardly anyone (actually no-one that I could name right now) that uses them.

I have recently done some extensive work for a client on a set of templates, themes, etc for the whole Office suite. For the Excel templates I included some cell styles to make it quick to format things in “corporate” colours for headings and so on (as well as default table styles for the same reason). This provides user convenience and helps them create more consistent documents with more of a “branded” feel to them.

As to imposing a regime of “pink means bad” and “orange double underline means linked” (linked to what?), no chance.

Why styles don’t address the real need for good formatting

I teach students on my Excel training courses that formatting of spreadsheets should be used for three purposes:

  • to highlight (data outliers; estimates as opposed to actuals)
  • to group or associate data together (months in the same quarter or year having a light shaded background say, next group no background; using matching colour for axes and lines in a two-series chart with two different scales)
  • to separate data by category or type (line above the first month of a new year; making the title row bold)

These principles of using formats to help interpret the data, rather than help it look pretty tend to get people focussed on the task rather than the appearance. The built-in cell styles only seem to address the concept of highlighting, rather than being useful for grouping or separating. The highlighting they provide seems arbitrary at best, and quite likely to cause headaches with some of the colours involved.

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Filed under Excel, Office System, Utilities + Tools Tagged with , , ,

Changing many cells in Excel to recalculate new values after VAT changes

November 26, 2008

So you have a spreadsheet with lots of values in – future monthly invoices for service contracts, say. Actual values, not calculations which multiply up by a VAT rate stored in another cell, or a named range, or even as a fixed number in a formula. And the Chancellor of the Exchequer just announced that the VAT rate (sales tax for our colonial cousins) has changed so all your values are now going to be wrong for the next twelve months.

What can you do to change many cells at once by a specific amount?

A few approaches spring to mind, depending on the scale of the problem and the structure of your data.

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Passed 70-291 to become MCSA:Messaging

November 25, 2008

“Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Windows 2003 server Network Infrastructure”, also known as The Beast has been slain.
Turned out to be a cuddly bunny rather than a beast (a bit like the end of Monty Python’s holy grail only in reverse).

I had put this off for so long because I thought I was weak on a couple of areas and needed some polish, and since everyone says it is one of the hardest I wanted to be sure to nail it.
But I was in the exam centre on Friday anyway (taking my CRM Applications exam MB2-632, also nailed) and I had second shot to back me up, so I figured “what the hell, even if I fail majestically at least I will know much more accurately what to expect on this one next time”.

So I waltzed away with 889 in a shade under half the time available (105 minutes out of 215 – I know some do better than that but I was well pleased with the result). Finally gave me my MCSA:Messaging and only two more to go (293 and 294) to MCSE.

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Filed under Certification Exams, Microsoft, Training + certification, Work and profile Tagged with ,

Microsoft Certified Application Specialist times five

August 16, 2008 4 Comments

MCAS logo I took five MCAS exams on Friday and passed them all. Some were easier than others, as always, but overall I found them a lot less stressful than when I took four on the same day to get the Microsoft Office Specialist:Master qualification.

Overall I like the way the Office exams work – the real application (minus the help!) running in the top half, and the questions at the bottom. Each question has a few tasks to complete, and you are measured on the end result, not how you got there.

This is a much better test of real-world ability to use the software than any multiple-choice questions can ever hope to be. Yes, it means that you could take a few wrong turns, and click on some irrelevant buttons before finding the thing you were looking for, but you can do that in real life too. The exam is limited to 50 minutes, so you can only afford to do this on a handful of questions, and you need to be able to make up the time on other questions by reading it once and going straight to the correct feature or function.

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Filed under Certification Exams, Office System, Training + certification, Windows Vista, Work and profile Tagged with , , , , ,

Our UK SBSC losses are Australian gains

July 30, 2008

Robbie Upcroft went back to Oz a while ago to carry on working with SBS partners down under after a stint at Microsoft UK. While over here he was a key part of expanding the Small Business Server community, working to set up local user groups, and it sounds like he is carrying on where he left off.

Another of the movers and shakers who made a huge impact to SBSC was the UK SMB girl herself, Susanne Dansey. After becoming an MVP just over a year ago for her contributions she upped and left us for foreign shores. Her passion and enthusiasm for technology and business are sorely missed, but now she too is bringing them to bear in Australia, joining the fun there in the run up to the launch of Cougar (SBS 2008 ) and EBS.

Susanne is blogging again as well, so with her and Robbie and other renowned SBS MVPs such as Wayne Small on the case, it looks like they have a great opportunity to make the most of the buzz. Good luck to all of them, and we hope to see you in the UK sometime soon, even if only for a flying visit!

Filed under Industry News, Small Business Server, Windows Server 2008 Tagged with , ,

Using Field Chooser to find out when an Outlook appointment was created

July 4, 2008 6 Comments

Ewan Dalton posted a tip for finding when an appointment was created on his blog “The Electric Wand”. This involves dipping into the developer tools to have a look at the actual fields that Outlook / Exchange uses to store the data about the calendar entry, as opposed to the standard stuff that gets displayed through the default form view.

However, he posted a comment a day or so later with a much faster method which is probably less scary to the average user (no mention of words like “developer ribbon”, “forms” and so on). Simply using the field chooser in the search results window means that you can see the created date (and any other additional information you want) at a glance. I thought it would be useful to expand this and give a quick tutorial, since being familiar with the Field Chooser in Outlook is useful in lots of other ways such as:

  • You might want to see the size of emails so you can sort the large ones to the top to delete first, reducing the size of your email file the most amount with the least effort
  • Maybe you have filed sent and received items together which relate to a particular topic or project, and you want to show both the To and From fields in this folder view
  • It is easy to accidentally drag and drop a column heading away which removes it completely, so you need to know how to get it back

So, let’s have some show and tell:

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Filed under Exchange, Office System Tagged with , , , ,

Great keyboard shortcuts from the Visio Guy

June 3, 2008

I love using keyboard shortcuts to work more efficiently, especially compared to using the trackpad on my laptop in a cramped or shaky environment like on a bus or when I’m driving (joke!)

I’m currently in the process of updating my shortcut key handouts which I give out to delegates on my MS Office training courses. I’m always finding new key combinations to use, but I try to make sure I teach people the most useful ones based on three criteria:

  1. Does this shortcut do something genuinely useful which people need to do frequently or repetitively?
  2. Is the key combination easily memorable? (Ctrl-B is fine, but Ctrl-Shift-Alt-F7 is less easy to recall when you need it!)
  3. How ‘standard’ is the shortcut across different applications, especially within MS Office?

Visio is an application I use quite a lot but would not really consider myself a “power user” (I don’t create and edit my own shapes, for example). I find it really straightforward to use and great for doing office layout plans, network schematics, and data or process flow diagrams. However, I was amazed to see how many keyboard shortcuts and keyboard / mouse combinations I was missing out on when I read this article yesterday over at the Visio Guy blog:

Work Faster With Our Top Visio Keyboard Shortcuts

Some of these I was already using as they are the same or similar in other applications, but I could have saved myself loads of time over the years if I had known how to do this to draw out a region to zoom to:

Zoom to Region: Ctrl + Shift + Left Mouse-drag

You can specify exactly where you want to zoom with this command. Press the Ctrl + Shift keys together, then hold the left mouse button. You can now drag a net around the area that you want to zoom. Visio will fill the window with the region that you specify.

What are your favourite shortcuts for getting round applications more quickly?

Filed under Office System, Training + certification Tagged with , ,

How Vista file copy has improved with sp1

February 19, 2008

Mark Russinovich is very well known within the technical community as an authority on detailed information on the inner workings of Microsoft products. Author of several books including the Windows resource kit “Windows Internals” volume, and founder of Winternals and sysinternals.com, he is now a Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft.

In a recent blog post, Mark explains in great detail the file copy process in Vista, why it changed radically from XP and how this impacted real and perceived performance of this basic function. He goes on to explain how some of this has been changed and remedied in Vista Service Pack 1. He makes it clear that some of the code design choices have to be compromises between making things faster in different situations, and that in most cases Vista <> Server 2008 filecopying will be faster using the chosen algorithms than they would be with different choices, or using XP or server 2003 for example.

Copying a file seems like a relatively straightforward operation: open the source file, create the destination, and then read from the source and write to the destination. In reality, however, the performance of copying files is measured along the dimensions of accurate progress indication, CPU usage, memory usage, and throughput. In general, optimizing one area causes degradation in others. Further, there is semantic information not available to copy engines that could help them make better tradeoffs. For example, if they knew that you weren’t planning on accessing the target of the copy operation they could avoid caching the file’s data in memory, but if it knew that the file was going to be immediately consumed by another application, or in the case of a file server, client systems sharing the files, it would aggressively cache the data on the destination system.

The article is also a useful working example of how Process Monitor can help you to see what your machine is really up to. On the same subject, Mark gave a great Tech Ed presentation in Barcelona with some real-world demonstrations of how to use a variety of Sysinternals tools and utilities to detect, find and fix all sorts of system issues. A video of that talk entitled “The Case of the Unexplained…Live!” can be viewed here (it’s just over an hour long).

Filed under Patching + hotfixes, Utilities + Tools, Windows Vista Tagged with , , ,

Windows Server 2008 Security Resource Kit coming very soon

February 15, 2008 1 Comment

book cover - Windows Server 2008 Security Resource KitJesper Johansson has put together a great book for Windows Server 2008 focusing on security and providing a load of resources that go beyond the shipped product.

Produced by a group of world-class contributors including several MVPs and members of Microsoft’s server security team, this is likely to be the definitive reference on the subject for some time.

According to Jesper’s blog it has now gone to press.

This official Microsoft Resource Kit delivers the in-depth, technical information and tools you need to help protect your Windows®–based clients, server roles, networks, and Internet services.

Leading security experts explain how to plan and implement comprehensive security with special emphasis on new Windows security tools, security objects, security services, user authentication and access control, network security, application security, Windows Firewall, Active Directory® security, group policy, auditing, and patch management. The kit also provides best practices based on real-world implementations.

You also get must-have tools, scripts, templates, and other key job aids, including an eBook of the entire Resource Kit on CD.

It’s an MS Press title so it should be pretty widely available, I will be pre-ordering my copy from here at The Register book store, as they have really competitive pricing and free delivery for orders over £25 at the moment.

Filed under Reviews, Security and Malware, Windows Server 2008 Tagged with

Windows Server 2008 Group Policy settings reference

February 11, 2008

Now that Windows Server 2008 has been released to manufacture (RTM), MS have published the usual spreadsheet reference containing all the settings which are available through Group Policy for managing Server 2008, Vista and all prior versions.

Download the Group Policy Settings Reference for Server 2008 in Excel 2007 (.xlsx) or older version (.xls) format.

Interestingly, this also includes 9 settings which are only available for Windows Vista service pack 1 (which also RTM’d last week). All of these are to do with controlling security settings for terminal services (RDP) sessions, including a setting I will find particularly useful to control whether a session can be established when the server cannot be authenticated.

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Filed under Group Policy, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Tagged with , , ,

Windows Server 2008 goes gold

February 6, 2008 1 Comment

Microsoft have now released Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing in the same week as Vista SP1 has also been finalised.

Release candidate code has been available since December for various subscribers such as Technet, MSDN and Microsoft partners. Read more of this post

Filed under Windows Server 2008 Tagged with , , , ,

Vista Service Pack 1 gets the green light

February 5, 2008 2 Comments

Vista’s much-awaited service pack 1 has had the go-ahead and is “released to manufacturing” (RTM). This means they can start pressing CD’s and get things moving through distribution channels, OEM and retail so people will soon be able to buy the product with sp1 built in (“slipstreamed”).

Read more about the release of Service Pack 1 for Vista here. The short version is that it won’t be available to actually download until mid-March

One of the benefits likely to get most press will be the changes to how Microsoft enforce their licencing through the “Windows Genuine Advantage” (WGA) programme which requires the software to be activated in order to continue using the full functionality. This has been held back from all the beta versions and will only take effect in the final released version. Paul Thurrott discusses this at his SuperSite for Windows:

First, Microsoft is disabling the two most common exploits that exist today for bypassing product activation in Vista … Pirate Windows users utilizing one of these hacks will see their systems return to the intended state–typically a grace period countdown–once SP1 is installed.

The second change is more dramatic. … If the product activation period expires, for example, Vista moves into Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM), where the user can only access the IE Web browser for 60 minutes at a time before being logged out; … Non-Genuine State (NGS), occurs when an activated copy of Vista fails a Web-based validation check, such as when you attempt to download software from the Microsoft Web site. In this case, certain features–like Windows Aero and ReadyBoost–are completely disabled, while others–like Windows Update and Windows Defender–work in limited ways only.

Beginning with SP1, RFM and NGS are a thing of the past.

Improvements to the software itself generally focus on performance and stability, but it does also improve on driver support and providing better APIs for third-party products such as anti-virus and desktop search (partly due to complaints that vendors were being “locked out” and could not develop products on an equal footing with Microsoft themselves).

One area which should be much better is the slow copying of files (even within a disk) which has plagued some systems. I will run some test copies of sets of large and small files and once I have the service pack installed I’ll post some results on how much performance gain I get.

Filed under Patching + hotfixes, Windows Vista Tagged with , , ,

Excel Hacks – David and Raina Hawley

December 11, 2007

Excel Hacks – 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tricks

Authors: David and Raina Hawley

Publisher: O’Reilly

Excel hacks book cover

Suggested Publisher Price: $24.95 US / $36.95 CDN / £17.50 UK

ISBN: 0-596-00625-X Softcover, 284 pages

Excel has fundamentally changed the way we’ve related to numbers for over a decade, but much of its power remains hidden.

Diving beneath the surface of Excel requires looking at features in unusual ways, but offers great rewards. Excel Hacks helps you leapfrog most of the preparatory work of understanding how it all works and what lives where, taking you straight to a set of immediately practical tools and techniques for analyzing, processing and presenting data.

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Filed under Office System, Reviews Tagged with , ,

Group Policy templates and references for Office 2007

November 19, 2007 3 Comments

It took a while but eventually Microsoft got round to providing the Group Policy administration templates for Office 2007 in ADMX format, so they can be used properly with the Group Policy management tools in Vista and Windows server 2008. By properly, I mean using a central store and having the option to use ADML files to view and edit policies in an administrator’s preferred local language. You can get the ADM, ADMX and ADML files for Office 2007 in a single download here which is a self-extracting file that creates a folder structure containing all the relevant files.

This also has the bonus of including the Office Customisation Tool (OCT) which you can use to create an MSP file to customise a centralised network installation of Office for new installations, upgrades, or reconfiguration. You can find out more about the methods for customising Office 2007 setup files here and specifics about the OCT here. In addition the download extracts an Excel workbook “Office2007GroupPolicyAndOCTSettings.xls” that provides information about the 2007 Office release Group Policy settings and OPA settings, making it clear what can be pre-customised at the point of installation and what can only be set through policies.

You will probably also find the Office 2007 settings reference file useful. This is a comprehensive reference for all the settings in the GUI for Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word 2007. This gives the equivalent UI path in 2003 (where there is one), the default setting, what choices can be made, what policy settings exist and which registry keys those change. A very helpful file for understanding how to customise the user experience, and deciding which parts to do through policies and which settings are better left to users (and perhaps prompting you to educate them about the usefulness of some of these).

Filed under Group Policy, Office System Tagged with , , ,

Group Policy, Profiles, and Intellimirror – Jeremy Moskowitz

November 5, 2007

Group Policy, Profiles, and Intellimirror (third edition)

Author: Jeremy Moskowitz, MCSE, MCSA, MVP

Publisher: Sybex

Suggested Publisher Price: $49.99 US / $69.95 CDN / £34.99 UK

ISBN: 0-7821-4298-2 Softcover, 536 pages (+TOC / index)

Group Policy, profiles etc. book cover

Buy the book direct from the Author (and get it signed!) (Update: this link now goes to a page for the replacement fourth edition of this book)

Everything you need to know about Group Policy in one useful reference…and loads more besides

The Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) is a dramatic step forward in the way Group Policy is administered. This book provides all the instruction and insight you need to take full control of your Active Directory with GPMC and other Group Policy tools. You’ll also learn techniques for implementing Intellimirror, making it possible for users to work securely from any location; and you’ll find intensive troubleshooting advice, insider tips on keeping your network secure, and hundreds of clear examples that will help you accomplish all your administration goals.

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Filed under Group Policy, Reviews Tagged with , ,

Excel 2007 calculation bug fix released after two weeks

October 10, 2007 6 Comments

A fix for the Excel 2007 calculation bug affecting results around 65535 and 65536 has been released in the last few hours. The Excel team blog post says:

As of today, fixes for this issue in Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007 are available for download…We are in the process of adding this fix to Microsoft Update so that it will get automatically pushed to users running Excel 2007 or Excel Services 2007.  Additionally, the fix will also be contained in the first service pack of Office 2007 when it is released (the release date for SP1 of Office 2007 has not been finalized).

Microsoft knowledgebase article KB943075 discusses the fix and gives the usual details for what versions and sizes the updated files should have after the fix. The version number of Excel.exe is altered from 12.0.6024.5000 to 12.0.6042.5000. Now read that again – yes, easy to miss the difference from ’24’ to ’42’ if you look too quickly. (NB: you may have a different version, mine is at 12.0.6024 after installing the security update as per KB936509, as far as I can tell.)

The download for the fix for Excel 2007 (33Mb exe file) is linked from the Excel team blog as well as from the KB article. The blog post also has links for Excel Services 2007, both 32 bit and 64 bit.

Filed under Excel, Office System, Patching + hotfixes Tagged with , , , , ,

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