Windows Update Causes Some VBA Code to Fail

The latest Office Watch newsletter is reporting that a recent Windows update is causing some VBA code to fail. This affects all Office applications. So if a macro or an add-in suddenly starts failing for no apparent reason, this could be the cause.

The culprit isn’t Office, but the version of Windows that it’s running on.  After the 2019-08 Cumulative Update KB4511553 is applied, some VBA code will stop working.  The patch bug is in Windows 10, 8.1 and 7 plus Windows Server editions (list below).

Not all VBA code is affected. Only code with an empty parameter being passed as a Variant  or a null array is passed.  That’s hardly unusual and should not cause an error.

Since the patch that caused the problem was part of a security update, fixing it may be a bit complicated but Microsoft is aware of the problem and working on a fix.