COPY WORD TABLE TO EXCEL MERGED CELLS UPDATE

We have applied KB3213656 to our Office 2016 environment in order to fix the Outlook spell check issue mentioned in the KB article. Poster Jase L dissected the problem on the Microsoft Answers forum and in the Technet forum:

COPY WORD TABLE TO EXCEL MERGED CELLS UPDATE

Why would an Office update break pasting merged cells into a word document? Any advise on this will be greatly appreciated this is impacting over 4600 documents at this time, and I am sure we will be finding many more. I tried this on a system that is not patched and the merged tables display properly in Word. If you un-merge the cells and paste it back into Word, it shows all of the data. If you copy the table out of Word and paste it into Excel, the data shows. If the cell is merged you can't click on the cell or see the data in the cell. Have a Word document that includes multiple tables, in each table there are merged cells.

Windows 10, Office 2016 Pro Plus both fully patched. Poster RAJasonCampbell on the Microsoft Answers forum describes the bug thusly: The only solution is to uninstall KB 3213656. Microsoft hasn’t yet acknowledged the problem, but there are several credible, detailed reports about the bug. The buggy patch was pushed out the Automatic Update chute on Aug. If you have tables in a Word doc or Outlook message and you suddenly can’t see or click on specific cells, chances are good that 1) the tables have merged cells, 2) you’re using Word 2016 or Outlook 2016, and 3) you installed this month’s KB 3213656.

Copy word table to excel merged cells