The appearence of tables in some Word 2010 documents changes after KB2880529

Question

I wanted to alert you that, since our company has applied
KB2880529, some users are reporting Word 2010 documents (docx) having their appearence changed.
More precisely, the issue concern the table inserted in the Word document : They are all messed up. For exemple, the begining of the table can look ok, then a few lines of the table are
badly miss aligned (like moved 2 cm to the right), then you've got a few normal lines, then again several bads, and so on.
Also, some of the cells, that were in the last column of the table, may appear half outside of the table.
And the worse part is that, even if you take some time to manualy fix the table, when you save the document and re-open it, everything is bad again, and exactly as it was before... so basicaly
the save doesn't work for the tables (it work if you change some text in the table, but not for the table itself (size of the columns, location of the columns, so on)).
I can't profite any file because they are of a very sensitive nature and can't leave our company, even if I remove most of the content, our IT security doesn't allow it.
Anyway :
- we are absolutly sure it's
KB2880529 that does that because when we uninstall the KB, and re-open the document, it look normal again.
- it seems to concern only documents that were created using some old Word 2003 templates some time ago, and then opened in Word 2010. As far as I know it doesn't happens on 100% Word 2010
documents.
So, we are currently doing a package installed by SCCM 2012 in order to uninstall it on all the PC which received it a few days ago.
Let's hope you'll correct that issue... and if possible that, in a near futur, you'll had a feature in SCCM 2012 to allow us to unintall KBs, like it was possible with WSUS.

Answer 1

I'm sure there are some ways to fix the files one by one. Indeed, our tests indicate that it's possible, for exemple, to open them in "LibreOffice 4.2" (a fork of OpenOffice), which displays them correctly, and then save the file in .doc and then use
Office 2010 to open this .doc and save it in .docx.
But what I've forget to indicate is that the issue touch probably thousands of documents that have been placed in a "document management application" (I'm not sure how to correctly translate) over the years, documents that may be hundreds of users need to
look at, for reference, from time to time... but basicaly the documents are "frozen" / archived, they must not be edited by anybody.
I very much doubt you can expect MS to not apply updates, including via the next Service Pack, just because some tables in some of your documents are corrupt. Besides which, the same problem will quite likely resurface when you next upgrade to a newer version
of Office. Ultimately, someone is going to have to check out all the documents with tables and verify their content. The scope of that project might be narrowed down after you've checked a few documents and found some common features between those with the
corrupt tables. It's easy enough to write a macro to test the files to see which ones have tables. That can serve as the first step in narrowing the scope of the project. It's also possible have the macro that repairs the files restore their
original time/date stamps if that's important.
An entirely different approach would be to temporarily uninstall the update on one PC. Then use that PC to convert all the documents to PDF. Then use the PDFs in the "document management application". Since the documents "must not be edited by anybody" the
PDF format is inherently more secure in that regard and can have security attributes set to prevent printing and/or content copying. The PDF format is also impervious to Word's tendency to change document layouts whenever you do little things like updating
printers or changing between doc & docx formats.
Cheers
Paul Edstein
[MS MVP - Word]