Overview
- Microsoft released the KB5002914 Office security update on September 8 to fix a long list of vulnerabilities, including remote code execution and information disclosure.
- Users reported that copy-and-paste, autofill, and dragging formulas stopped working in Excel, and Microsoft confirmed the issue affects Excel 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024.
- The failure is silent: when paste fails the source remains selected and the destination is unchanged with no error or beep, increasing the risk that users will not notice missing or incorrect data.
- Affected users and administrators say uninstalling or rolling back the update restores Excel functions, but doing so also removes the security patches and can be impractical for some managed environments.
- Microsoft says it is investigating and will update its support article; the company has issued out-of-band fixes for other September regressions but has not yet published an official corrective update for the Excel bug.