Copy and paste stopped working in Excel this week. It was the update.

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, nothing. The cell you copied stays selected, the cell you aimed at is unchanged, and Excel gives you no beep, no error, no clue that anything went wrong. If that started happening this week, you did not break it. KB5002914 did.

Microsoft shipped the update on 8 September as part of Patch Tuesday, closing remote code execution and information disclosure holes in Excel. Within a day the complaints were stacking up on Reddit and on Microsoft's own Q&A forum, and on 10 September the company added the bug to the known issues section of the KB5002914 support page. The official wording is admirably blunt: the paste operation might fail silently, the source stays selected, the destination is unmodified. Excel 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024 are all affected, across both MSI and Click-to-Run installs. Dragging the little square at the corner of a cell to fill a column has stopped working for a lot of people too. Right-click paste still works for some, which is the only reason everyone has not noticed at once.

Microsoft says its teams are investigating and has not offered a date. Removing the update does restore normal behaviour, and the commands to do it are circulating, but that also hands back the security fixes on an application whose entire job is opening files other people sent you. Unless spreadsheets are how you earn your living, waiting is the better side of that trade. And the trick doing the rounds where you copy an older excel.exe over the new one is a bad idea for reasons that should be obvious.

The fix, when it comes, will arrive as another Office update, which is one of those things that is easy to miss for weeks. Tendvane's check-for-updates gathers what is pending into one screen, so you find out the day it lands rather than the next time you happen to look.