 | By Susan Bradley Microsoft’s Office File Validation update is not playing well with Excel, and the company knows it. So your top update priority is not the usual round of security patches, but rather hiding and ignoring this problematic OFV update. |
2501584
OFV: A good security concept, badly implemented
Office File Validation was introduced in Office 2010 as a security measure to validate older Office files. In other words, it tries to weed out possibly malicious documents. In April, Microsoft released Security Advisory 2501584, which added OFV to Office 2003 and 2007. (The patch was distributed through Microsoft Update on June 28.)
Although OFV is fine in concept, the update proved to have many unpleasant side effects. Its known issues, documented in MS Support article 2501584, include: the inability to open older Office files, Solver.xla no longer working in Office 2003, pasting data from one file to another might take excessively long, and opening files from a network share might be much slower.
Moreover, uninstalling the OFV update is confusing; normally we look for KB numbers to uninstall updates, but this time we have to look for the update’s name. OFV is not listed as KB 2501584 in the Windows Add or Remove Programs tool but as Microsoft Office File Validation Add-In (as shown in Figure 1).
Figure 1. The OFV update is listed as “Microsoft Office File Validation Add-In” in the Windows Add or Remove Programs tool.
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