Microsoft fixes the fix that broke Excel paste – partly

Microsoft has issued a partial fix for an issue with Excel's paste functionality, which was introduced in a security update released in September. The hotfix specifically targets Excel 2016, but Microsoft warns that pasting may still fail in workbooks with conditional formatting. Earlier, Microsoft acknowledged that the initial security update had caused a problem in Excel 2024, 2021, 2019, and 2016, where the paste operation might fail silently, with no indication of failure to the user.

Users would paste content, but the source would remain selected, and the destination would stay unmodified. Some users could work around the issue with Paste Special, while others had to wait for Microsoft to provide a fix. The partial fix for the Excel 2016 paste issue has now arrived, but Microsoft is still dealing with the fallout from September's Windows security update, which required an out-of-band release to address several problems.

Other issues, such as silent USB audio devices and domain-joined devices, remain on Microsoft's known issues list. While Microsoft has repaired another bug introduced by an August update, the company's best fix remains not breaking things in the first place.