Excel patch locked out far-eastern users

MICROSOFT has updated its Excel sheet spreader with a security patch after its first attempt failed, leaving users unable to open some documents.

Korean, Chinese, and Japanese users found themselvles locked out of their Excel filkes after the Vole delivered security update 'MS07-002' on Tuesday 9 January.

They were a bit miffed.

The patch was supposed to deal with "critical" vulnerabilities in Excel that could let an attacker remotely execute code on a target machine.

Instead users of the most common far-eastern languages were locked out of their files as Excel became baffled by what Microsoft said was phonetic information in the files.

The error only affected Excel 2000 and can now be repaired through the Microsoft Update service. µ