Excel’s New Math

Microsoft has issued a patch of a patch from last Patch Tuesday
for Excel, since the fix added some math errors. The fix issued a critical
error that would allow for remote code execution and affected all versions of
Office from 2000 and up.

In this case, the fix is solid. The problem, as Microsoft
spokesman Tim Rains said in a blog posting, is that a calculation error was
introduced into Excel 2003 “when a Real Time Data source was used in a
user-created Visual Basic for Applications solution (in other words a
custom-built VBA function).”

On installing the update, users encountered a ‘Real Time
Data’ error when attempting to use the component with Office’s Visual Basic for
Applications software.

The patch of the patch is available through Microsoft’s
Automatic Update.