Microsoft has removed the latest updates for Office 2010 after many users have complained about severe bugs including one that breaks Excel for Japanese users.
The Redmond company unleashed the updates on January 2, on par with the changes that will take place in the Japanese calendar as the end of the Heisei era is rapidly approaching. The current Emperor, Tenno Akihito, plans to abdicate on April 30 this year and a new era will begin in Japan.
The updates for removed on January 5 and all the updates included changes to the Japanese calendar, a point that made many people to believe that this was the most probable culprit. Japanese blogs noted that after the installation of non-security updates users that attempted to start Excel received an ’Excel cannot be opened’ error message and even when the program worked it sometimes froze randomly. Many users reported that manually removing the updates solved their problem as they were able to use the program normally once again.
A support log released for the Excel 2018 update has acknowledged that the updates were faulty and they were removed in order to prevent future problems. The company has previously noted that similar bugs were caused when Japanese calendars were adjusted. The problem is similar to the historic Y2K Moment when computers around the world failed to differentiate between 2000 and 1900.
During the transition period it is likely that more bugs will surface and users are advised to pay attention to any possible issues.
This is not the only problem faced by Microsoft. The October 2018 Update is currently running on less than 10% of all the Windows 10 PCs due to a variety of problems. When it was first released a major bug led to the accidental deletion of important user data. After the data was deleted the update was overwritten on the recently freed space and users were unable to recover their lost files.
It is likely that a stable update will be released in the following weeks.