Early Windows 10 April 2018 Update adopters certainly know that this new feature release is far from offering the flawless experience that everyone expected.
Instead, it comes with bugs hitting not only Windows features, but also apps installed on systems, in the end forcing some people to roll back to their previous Windows 10 version.
One of the most recent bugs affects Microsoft Excel 2002, a spreadsheet application that although old, is still running on a surprisingly big number of computer. In fact, this makes sense. Microsoft Office is generally a very expensive piece of software, and even though the Redmond-based software giant no longer supports the 2002 release, many customers continue running it.
This is how some ended up with a rather odd combination of Windows 10 and Microsoft Excel 2002. And since the productivity app is an old software solution, it’s no surprise that it’s hitting some glitches on the April 2018 Update.
As explained here, Microsoft Excel crashes all of a sudden in Windows 10 April 2018 Update whenever users try to enter a new formula or a date in a cell. The app then recovers and attempts to bring back the file with the previous modifications in the typical Microsoft Office way.
For some reason, this happens every time the said behavior is triggered, leading to infinite reboots of the Excel app and, obviously, not allowing users to work with formulas. Since it’s Microsoft Excel we’re talking about here, this isn’t really good news.
While Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on both the bug and a possible fix, it turns out there’s actually a way to resolve this glitch, even though it’s not the most convenient. Needless to say, with Microsoft Excel 2002 no longer getting patches and fixes, there’s a good chance the Redmond-based software giant won’t release a fix. Unless the problem resides in Windows 10, that is, and a future cumulative update fixes this issue as well.
As for the workaround itself, it all comes down to changing the formatting of all cells in your spreadsheets. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest is to simply select all cells and then format them to align text to left, center, or right. This solution appears to work for most users experiencing this issue, and we’re being told that applying other formatting changes to cells does the magic as well.
This workaround has to be applied every time you open a new spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel 2002, otherwise you won’t be able to work in a document.
Changing the formatting of a cell shouldn’t be such a big problem for users, as aligning text to left or center doesn’t make much of a difference, especially when working with a formula.
There are no other solutions found until now to correct this problem, and it’s not exactly clear why changing the formatting settings of all cells fixes it temporarily, but without a doubt, Microsoft should investigate these reports. Similar issues could affect other apps as well, so in case a patch is indeed released to correct it, the problem could eventually go away not only from Microsoft Excel 2002, but from other apps as well.
The next Patch Tuesday kicks off in just a few hours, and just like the other Windows 10 versions on the market, the April 2018 Update should be getting its own cumulative update as well. Given the number of issues reported lately in this new feature update, today’s cumulative update is expected to include lots of fixes, though it’s too early to tell whether the Excel 2002 glitch would be resolved as well.