Microsoft yanks buggy Office 2010 non-security patches

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This just in from Günter Born… Microsoft has yanked all four of Tuesday’s Office 2010 non-security patches. None of these are currently available in
[See the full post at: Microsoft yanks buggy Office 2010 non-security patches]

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Myst, rontpxz81, Pierre77, SueW, Elly, Chris B, fk5353, GreatAndPowerfulTech, jburk07

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So there goes away the faith that M$ was testing their software before releasing it to the cannon foder.

Ah well, back to LibreOffice.

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Myst, fk5353, lurks about, WildBill

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When does Office 2010 hit End-of-Life? I’ve got Office 2013 Home & Student, so I’m only affected by updates to the core apps. Would like to know when Office 2013 reaches its EOL, too. Unless Microsoft surprises me with a dependable, stable Win 10 in 3 years, it’s Linux & LibreOffice before 2023.

Bought a refurbished Windows 10 64-bit, currently updated to 22H2. Have broke the AC adapter cord going to the 8.1 machine, but before that, coaxed it into charging. Need to buy new adapter if wish to continue using it.
Wild Bill Rides Again...

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I’m rather looking forward to Office 2010 EOL. At least I will have a product that is likely to stay stable, rather than one that risks being broken by patches. I spend less time on maintaining my wife’s Office 2007 than I do my Office 2010.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Myst, SueW

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WildBill wrote:

When does Office 2010 hit End-of-Life? I’ve got Office 2013 Home & Student, so I’m only affected by updates to the core apps. Would like to know when Office 2013 reaches its EOL, too. Unless Microsoft surprises me with a dependable, stable Win 10 in 3 years, it’s Linux & LibreOffice before 2023.

October 13th 2020 for Office 2010 Service Pack 2. April 11 2023 for Office 2013. Note that these are the end dates for Extended Support, not Mainstream Support.

Hope this helps…

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Myst, OscarCP, SueW, Elly, WildBill, GreatAndPowerfulTech, woody

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Yes… but turns out I had the EOL for Office 2013 already in my notes. Still didn’t know about Office 2010 EOL. Thanks!

Bought a refurbished Windows 10 64-bit, currently updated to 22H2. Have broke the AC adapter cord going to the 8.1 machine, but before that, coaxed it into charging. Need to buy new adapter if wish to continue using it.
Wild Bill Rides Again...

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This is a test post. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3

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You gotta wonder who tests this stuff.

Well, think of it from a pure software development perspective.

Microsoft isn’t going to put their best developers and testers on applying fixes to a 9-year-old code base. Would you?  Do you want to risk p***g off your best people by assigning them to dull c***?

The folks working on Office 365 Excel are doing things like the new “Ideas” feature, which creates previews of several different types of charts, based on analyzing some tabular data.  That’s really cool.  Imagine having to hang around the office with the people who work on that stuff, but your boss is telling you, no, you have to work on an ancient code base instead, because one country has really arbitrary ideas about calendars.

The people who work on these fixes are also extremely unlikely to have ever been involved with the original development of Office 2010 or its service packs, so they’ll lack an innate knowledge and understanding of the potential pitfalls when making certain kinds of changes.

It’s not like getting hired at a company magically imbues you with all the historical knowledge and understanding you’ll need to do your job perfectly.

They probably don’t have all the automated testing infrastructure up and running like they used to back in the early 2010s…. heck, the people who built up that infrastructure have long since forgotten how they did it, or they simply don’t work at Microsoft anymore.  It’s really been that long that this is a completely reasonable possibility.

I’m not saying any of this as a defense or justification for shipping shoddy software.  But I do manage software developers for a living, and I’ve seen teams unknowingly ship obviously broken things many times in the past, so I know exactly how these kinds of things can happen.  It doesn’t matter that it’s Microsoft Office…. anyone can make these mistakes.

 

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mindwarp, ch100

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@warrenrumak
Think about this. Most people reading this site don’t have an insider perspective when it comes to the IT industry. They have no idea about the fact that obsolete products (read this as on the way out) don’t get much attention from the software manufacturers due to the reasons which you mentioned and are kept alive only for legal or public relations reasons. Other readers understand this very well, but prefer to believe in fairy tales or fairness taken to the extreme and literally in the society. This explains the obsession which some people have with Windows 7 which is definitely obsolete in a technical sense or with Office 2010 (which is technically not obsolete as a desktop product, but close to EOL as defined by Microsoft). There is another post claiming that Office 2007 maintenance is easy because there are no updates anymore, while Office 2010 maintenance is made difficult by failed updates. What stops that poster to not update Office 2010 at all if this is their ideal outcome?

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I am the poster who commented, slightly facetiously, on EOL Office 2010 and Office 2007.

I have not upgraded from Windows 7, which I agree is old, to Windows 10, which normally I would love to do, because of the forced and broken patching service. That means I am staying, pro tem, with 6/7 year old hardware, whereas I would prefer to go to modern hardware. I also begrudge MS the extra £100 per PC for W10 Pro (that I don’t otherwise need) simply in order to be able to control the update process.

So far as Office is concerned, I cannot see that for me, as a retired personal customer, the annual subscription to Office represents good value. So I will stick with my current licences until they cease to be serviceable and then go to an open source alternative.

Despite my truculent comments, there is a hard nosed  basis behind it.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Myst, SueW, Pierre77, Elly, ch100

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Thank you Chris, for helping me to see a new perspective on this contentious division. Personal slights are given and received over ratings of knowledge, experience, even paranoia. But one of the easiest ways to charge forward with Microsoft’s bold new plans is to spend other people’s money.

When you work for a major corporation that can write off these expenditures all the way down to a profitable income stream (read this as make your clients pay for it), it becomes easier to mock owners and proprietors that sweat over every penny that cannot be given as raises for their employees. Truly a luxury in working for the company rather than expanding the market as an entrepreneur.

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Cybertooth

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While turnover and reassignments will mean a loss of knowledge there is no excuse for MS’ current testing method of sending to the users for alpha testing. If the base code is so convoluted that making changes causes cascading bugs then the original code is garbage. I am a developer and have a great deal of respect for the testers and the need for through testing before code is released.

The issues you raised are really mismanagement problems, the upper mismanagement fundamentally does not care about the customer using legacy products or why they are using legacy products. If they did they would make sure Windows releases and updates were not a minefield for users and that legacy Office updates were not another minefield to get through.

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Cybertooth, Elly

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warrenrumak wrote:

Microsoft isn’t going to put their best developers and testers on applying fixes to a 9-year-old code base.

So assign someone else.  It doesn’t really matter who writes the code… everyone in your employ ought to have a basic level of competence.  The bottom line is that by the time a patch is ready to go live, it should be release-quality, however the company wants to make that happen.  Very often, that has not been the case lately with MS products, and that includes those that are not in their final years of supported life (like Windows 10).

Would you? Do you want to risk p***g off your best people by assigning them to dull c***?

If they are my best people, I would hope they would understand that not everything can be fun and games.  It’s one of the things that a closed-source company has that open-source projects often don’t, and that’s an authority figure to assign people to fix things that aren’t fun but are part of a quality product release.  Sometimes being a professional means doing things that are dull.

When I was doing assignments programming in “uni,” as my overseas friends would call it, I wasn’t usually particularly enthused about what I had to do either.  You do what you have to do.  If you work for someone else, they’re going to have you do tasks you don’t find inspiring sometimes… and if you quit and go into business for yourself, you’ll end up doing all kinds of tasks you find tedious.  Tedious, but vitally important to the product you’ve now got the responsibility of shipping.

warrenrumak wrote:

The folks working on Office 365 Excel are doing things like the new “Ideas” feature, which creates previews of several different types of charts, based on analyzing some tabular data. That’s really cool.

I can’t comment about this specific new thing, as I haven’t seen it, but in general, Excel was feature-complete decades ago.  It doesn’t need to be really cool!  That’s been one of the big issues with Windows development in the marketing-driven, “new features every six months” WaaS era.  It doesn’t need to be cool… dull, boring, and utterly competent at what it does would be much better than “cool,” whether you’re talking about an operating system or an office suite.  Most of the change is just for the sake of change, not driven by any need other than that of the marketing people, who want something they can hook onto so that they can claim this year’s revision is the latest and best, reminiscent of model year changes in cars that are otherwise mechanically identical to last year’s model.  Leave the “cool” for the games developers and other makers of entertainment software!

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mindwarp, Myst, SueW, Tom in Az, Chris B, lurks about, Cybertooth, Elly

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@ascaris, I couldn’t have said it better. These developers need to understand that they work directly for their employers, and ultimately for the people who pay their employers: the customers.

Far too often nowadays, instead of “the customer is always right” they (and their managers) have adopted a contemptuous attitude toward the customer, who for all they know is struggling to make ends meet or to build up a new business and has neither the time nor the interest in trying out “cool new features”–she simply wants the software that she paid for with her hard-earned money to just work. Instead of being taken as a useful market signal, her failure to share the developers’ enthusiasm for these cool new features gets her branded as a “hater,” when in fact it’s the developers and their apologists who are the real haters: haters of other people who have different preferences and a different set of priorities.

But then, as they are wont to say, haterz gonna hate.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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Ascaris

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@Ascaris – Marketing driving development is a disaster waiting to happen. Many types of software have been effectively feature complete for at least a decade if not longer. The new ‘features’ do not add anything important to the user for applications. For OSes, the only new features needed is hardware support for new hardware and new protocols but often this can be done with adding drivers, etc. for older versions.  What most software needs is improved fit and finish not new ‘features’ that are of dubious value at best.

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Ascaris

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Yep, the four patches disappeared from Windows Update on my Win 7 machines this morning.

I’m having trouble believing that MS can’t get this Japanese issue resolved without borking things. How hard can this be?

I’ve become really depressed at the quality of MS patches and software/documentation/ui/ux in general over the past few years. Sometimes the old way of doing things is better.

On another note, I installed the latest Linux Mint release on one of my laptops yesterday and also began testing it on one of my desktops. A thing of beauty – saw all devices, everything just works (sound optical out, ethernet, wifi, usb3, kb, mice, etc.). Fast and a nice UX and UI. Ya know where I’m going with this …. I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office, MySQL, Apache, PHP, Linux compatible programming tools, etc on my Win machines.

– Carl –

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Do the office 2010 patches mentioned in this thread, apply to Microsoft Office Starter 2010 (click to run) ?

The reason I ask is because I hid these two Security Updates for Microsoft Office 2010 KB4011274 & KB4022206

I don’t use any other Microsoft Office product other than Microsoft Office Starter 2010 “click to run”. which is a “release to manufacturing” (RTM) version of Office 2010.

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The patches listed apply to the mis version, not C2R. C2R has its own updating system.

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PKCano, Thanks for the info,
Go figure MS sending my computer patches it doesn’t need.
Maybe someday MS will turn over a new leaf.

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Office Click-to-Run updates on Patch Tuesday (the 2nd one). I’m running Office 2013 on Windows 8.1 & that’s the timeframe. I don’t update Windows or Office until Woody bumps MS-DEFCON to 3 or higher.

Bought a refurbished Windows 10 64-bit, currently updated to 22H2. Have broke the AC adapter cord going to the 8.1 machine, but before that, coaxed it into charging. Need to buy new adapter if wish to continue using it.
Wild Bill Rides Again...

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My own approach in recent times has been to wait until: (a) The Master Patch List has all the monthly Windows 7 patches of any importance listed as OK to install, and (b) it has been no less than three weeks since Patch Tuesday, no great trouble has been reported for those patching, like me, as Group B in the interim, probably all out of band patches for the month have already come out and it is already known what is best to do about them. Now I am looking forward to the new, diversified DEFCON system to be implemented in the new, improved Woody’s that is coming soon, with a break-down by Windows version.

So, because of this personal policy, even while, gratefully, taking note of them, I do not consider the MS coming and goings early every month, both before and following Patch Tuesday, as being of real concern to me. Unless there is a widely reported and potentially dire problem, such as really bad malware attacks considered likely, that requires quicker action. But that has been a rare occurrence, fortunately. Other users may not have the possibility of waiting for long after the patches come out before installing them and I sympathize with their plight.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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It’s now 2019 and M$ is still yanking updates. If those clowns at M$ cannot ever get the updates right, then I’m just going to eventually install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or later. Then I’m going to run Windows 7 offline in VMware for non-Linux-compatible programs until I replace programs like Sony ACID and Photoshop Elements with open-source software.

I am no longer an active member of the forums.

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Myst, Cybertooth

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I fully appreciate your sentiment. Unfortunately, I do not have the expertise, time to acquire it nor licences (VMWare and transferable Win7)  to follow suit, and I suspect there are very many others (even on this forum) who are in the same position.

So, Microsoft, stop stranding us with buggy software and hazardous patching processes and treat us like proper customers.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Glad I didn’t install-

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I have ignored these later updates which were initially offered as important but then became unchecked. I have this week installed the main December updates (KBs 4483187, 4471987, and 4471318) excluding the MSRT which I hide these days. They were installed ok on both my Windows 7 x64 home desktops. The six original Office 2010 updates were also installed ok on the one machine that uses Office.

Time now, of course, to batten down the hatches prior to whatever excitements the January updates bring us!

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SueW, banzaigtv, Myst

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I have every reason to be a bit nervous about the new updates, even on Windows 8.1. The worst thing about this is we can no longer wait to install the Patch Tuesday updates since they will very quickly be replaced by out-of-band updates. Patch Tuesday updates must be installed IMMEDIATELY!!! It is imperative that you back up your disk drives before installing the updates. Use Acronis, Clonezilla, or whatever. Also be sure to back up your documents, photos, etc. just to be safe.

I am no longer an active member of the forums.

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The worst thing about this is we can no longer wait to install the Patch Tuesday updates since they will very quickly be replaced by out-of-band updates. Patch Tuesday updates must be installed IMMEDIATELY!!!

Assuming that isn’t satire, I have no idea where it’s coming from, but it’s totally contrary to everything this site stands for.

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ch100, SueW, Elly, Microfix

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https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4462157/january-18-2019-update-for-office-2010-kb4462157

This update contains the following improvements and fixes:

•This update adds support for new Japanese eras in the Japanese calendar.
Note To enable this improvement, you must install KB 4461579 together with this update.

•Fix: After KB 4461614 is applied, Access 2010 and Excel 2010 stop working.

Updates for May 2019 Japan Era Change for Office

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ch100

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