The case of the broken Microsoft Word VBA application

Filed under It's A Bug, Microsoft Office by Dale on October 6, 2009 at 1:04 am 0 Comments

It was a Microsoft Word (VBA) application written back in 2001.

Essentially what it does is:

  1. user selects a letter type.
  2. the user then enters some customer reference numbers.
  3. the VBA application does an Oracle database lookup to convert those customer reference numbers into names and postal addresses.
  4. which the VBA then uses to “mail merge” into whatever number of letters need to be sent out.

And it was broken.

I had a feeling that writing about patch management policy would come back to bite me (and it did).

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