Excel 2002/3 crashes when typing/pasting after Windows 10 1803 update

I have experienced the same problem with Excel 2002 (part of the Office XP Professional suite). I knows it's very old and out of date but it suits my purposes and does everything I need from a spreadsheet.

The problem began to occur with Windows 10/1803/64 bit. I noticed that Excel crashed for no apparenent reason when I entered dates and got it to work out the number of days. I tried to solve the problem by re-installing the whole XP suite. Fortunately I had retained a copy of Office XP Service Pack 3, so was able to re-install that as it's not been available from Microsoft Update for years. I turned off 'Update Options for other MS products' as it kept on trying to download but failed to install anything. However, the re-install made no difference. Since I could not go back to the previous version of Win 10 (1709?), I was stuck.

I tried various "free" Office products, including some cloud based products. I didn't like any of the latter. I then tried the highly recommended LibreOffice which I thought was quite good initially but after a week or so use I found it quite "clunky" compared with Excel (i.e. somewhat hesitant at times and a bit slower), and it crashed twice for no apparent reason. Also, I didn't like its date formatting features, and its facilities for drawing boxes around certain cells seemed tedious. Some of the "options" seem unnecessary and several of them don't change the default values.

I got rid of LibreOffice and finished up WPS Office 2016. I first tried this several years ago but didn't like it much compared with XP. Since then they've improved it. I think this is the best option for anyone like me who has had trouble with Excel 2002 but wants something as close as possible to that. So far after a week's use I'm happy with it. It works very smoothly indeed and it's virtually identical to Excel 2002, with one or two useful extras.

I can't see Microsoft ever getting round to resolving the problem with Excel 2002/03.

Hi there @MD31

Glad you found an acceptable alternative -- however if you want to run EXCEL 2002 /3 for ever why not install it say in a W7 / VISTA / XP virtual machine --- run VBOX / VMWARE Player -- both free for creating the virtual machines. Running virtual machines on todays hardware for these types of applications costs almost no overheads at all.

Simply install the OS from the "Virtual Machine Wizard", power it on (i.e start it) and then install your EXCEL program. Should work fine and you can share data files etc with your main (Real) machine.

Cheers
jimbo

@jimbo

Thanks for your advice. I'll keep it in reserve if ever I get problems with WPS Office.

I wonder if Microsoft realise that Win 1803 appears to have caused the rendering useless of Excel 2002/3?

@Bree

Many thanks.

A couple of days ago I removed Office XP Pro from my PC, but in view of your advice I have now re-mounted it, together with Office XP Service Pack 3.

The solution works! It's quite amazing. I have tried it out several times on some old files and a new one I created.

Of course, I've lost all the other updates and security fixes since Service Pack 3 but I'll have to live with that and see how things go.

^ Yes, I saw the reference to KB2541003 as a possible cause of the problem. I tried to delete it but couldn't find a way of doing so, as it wasn't listed among the updates (in control panel) that can be removed.

I wonder what Microsoft will dream up next to foul up Excel 2002? I bet they're working on something really nasty next time. For that reason, I think I'll retain WPS Office as a backup.

I have found that Excel 2003 when fully updated does not crash - check for version 11.8404.8405

Version 11.8404.8172 (from install CD) does crash but after using Windows Update with "Give me updates for other Microsoft Products when I update Windows" enabled, it changed to version 8405 and seemed to no longer be a problem.

I've had no luck with Excel 2002 though, other than the formatting workaround.

Glad to see lots of other people still using old Excel. Myself, I much prefer the faster graph rendering of 2002/2003 Excel and use it for this reason. Once they introduced the anti-aliasing and the context responsive ribbon, navigating through 100s of graphs became frustratingly slow.