Excel paste fails silently after Microsoft's September security update

Excel may refuse to paste anything after last week's Office updates. The command does nothing. The source cell stays selected, the destination stays empty, and Excel gives no sign that something went wrong. No beep, no error message. Microsoft has now confirmed the bug.

Microsoft confirms the bug in its own update description

Security update KB5002914 shipped on September 8 alongside the rest of the September Patch Tuesday. Microsoft added a known issue to the update description two days later. It says the paste operation "might fail silently" in Excel 2024, 2021, 2019 and 2016. It adds that "the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified". Users get "no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message". Microsoft is researching the issue and will post more information when it becomes available.

That is still where things stand. No date for a fix has been announced.

Pasting is not the only thing that fails

Reports cover more than the paste command. Users say the fill handle no longer drags formulas down a column and that copying an entire worksheet inside a workbook stalls. Excel crashed with an access violation in one case, error code 0xc0000005. A user running Office LTSC 2021 wrote on Reddit that VBA macros stopped working after the update and ran again only after a rollback to the previous build. Susan Bradley asked on the patchmanagement.org mailing list last week whether anyone else saw the same thing in Office 2019.

Which Excel versions are affected

Microsoft names Excel 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024. Those are the perpetual releases, installed either from an MSI package or through Click-to-Run. Readers also reported the LTSC editions of Office 2021 and 2024 to Günter Born, who has been collecting the reports on his blog.

Microsoft does not list Microsoft 365 as affected. A German admin forum carries a single report of a clipboard error in Microsoft 365 Apps for Business, Version 2608, Build 20326.20144, on the Current Channel. The copied row still pasted inside Excel there, including into a different workbook, and the Monthly Enterprise Channel build 20326.20142 at the same company stayed clean. That is not a confirmed pattern. Anyone on a Microsoft 365 subscription looks safe so far.

What you can do now

A different paste route is the quickest fix. Right-click the destination cell and choose Paste Special, then Values, and the content lands where it should. Formatting and formulas are not carried over, which is good enough for short-term work.

KB5002914 can be uninstalled on an MSI installation, and Excel works as before afterwards. Click-to-Run does not allow single updates to be removed. The whole Office installation has to go back to an earlier build instead. Microsoft describes that route in a support article of its own. The command for it is OfficeC2RClient.exe with the target version as a parameter.

One piece of advice making the rounds in forums is worth ignoring. It suggests leaving the update in place and swapping only excel.exe for an older copy. Trading individual Office binaries costs stability and compatibility, and the security state of the installation is no longer traceable afterwards.

The rollback has a price

KB5002914 closes 29 vulnerabilities in Excel, several of them allowing remote code execution and others exposing information. Removing the update brings those holes back. That is a bad trade at a desk where files from strangers land in the inbox every day. Anyone working only on their own files can weigh the risk differently. Microsoft last put users in this position in January, when a Patch Tuesday left some machines with a black screen.

Paste Special remains the option that breaks nothing until Microsoft ships a fix.