Excel 2003 Update: KB834691 helps to correct a flaw where, under certain circumstances, Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 can cause the RAND(), RANDBETWEEN(), SLOPE(), INTERCEPT(), FORECAST(), and STEYX() functions to return incorrect values. This update fixes the flaw so that these functions generate the correct results.

Toolbox   The full-file version of Excel 2003 Update: KB834691 consists of one Windows Installer patch file (excel-FullFile-GLB.msp) packaged in a self-extracting executable (office2003-kb834691-fullfile-enu.exe). You can find this downloadable file on the Office 2003 Resource Kit Downloads page.

Localized versions of the update are listed later in this article in the section titled "Localized versions of the Excel 2003 update."

 Note    The full-file version of the Excel 2003 update will install successfully on installations of the original release version of Office.

Strategies for updating your Excel 2003 installations

Office 2003 offers administrators new options for updating Excel 2003 on users' computers. When you install Office 2003 from a compressed CD image on the network, rather than from an administrative installation point, Setup caches the compressed cabinet files on the local computer and performs the installation from there. After the installation is complete, the local installation source remains where it is — hidden and available. Because users have access to a source on their own computers, you can distribute smaller client patches to update Office. And because the original network image stays the same, clients never become out of sync with an updated image.

Microsoft recommends you establish and maintain a baseline image of Excel 2003 and take advantage of a local installation source and smaller binary patches. The binary version of the Excel 2003 Update: KB834691 is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

For more information about this update method, see Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates and find the "Caching installation files locally and distributing client updates" section.

If you deployed Excel 2003 from an uncompressed administrative installation point, you cannot take advantage of local caching. However, you can still maintain your administrative image at a baseline level and distribute the full-file (administrative) version of the Excel 2003 update directly to users. Because administrative updates install complete files, rather than patched files, the administrative update can correctly replace any files that have been modified with previous updates. Users can apply them even when they do not have access to an installation source.

For more information about applying administrative patches to directly to client computers, see Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates and read the section "Distributing full-file administrative updates".

In an organization with strong centralized control over software deployment, you may choose to apply the Excel 2003 update to the administrative installation point, and then recache and reinstall Excel 2003 on users' computers to apply the changes. In this scenario, new client installations always include the most recent updates; however, if there is a delay in updating some clients, they become unsynchronized with the patched administrative image.

For detailed procedures for patching the administrative image and updating client computers, see Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates and read the section "Updating clients from a patched administrative image".

Localized versions of the Excel 2003 update

Localized versions of the Excel 2003 update are available in the following languages and can be downloaded from the Office 2003 Resource Kit Localized Downloads page:

Files changed by the Excel 2003 update

The following table lists the file changed by the full-file Excel 2003 update. If you need to confirm whether a share has been updated, you can check the related file version number.

List of features updated by the Excel 2003 update

If you update your administrative installation point and recache and reinstall Excel 2003 on client computers, you run a command line that includes the REINSTALL=[list of features] property. This property specifies whether you want to reinstall specific features or reinstall all applications on the administrative image.

For the Excel 2003 update, the value for [list of features] is as follows:

EXCELFiles

Optionally, you can substitute the parameter REINSTALL=ALL to reinstall all Office components on the client computer. For detailed procedures on how to patch an administrative image and update client computers, see Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates and read the section "Updating clients from a patched administrative image".

Related links

For an overview of Excel 2003 Update: KB834691, see Description of the Excel 2003 update: March 23, 2004 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

For general information on applying an administrative update, see Deploying a Service Release in the Office XP Resource Kit.