Last week we had an unfortunate event happen. The Microsoft Patch Tuesday release had a security fix for VBA that inadvertently created a bug in Access that prevented customers from using a DB (ACCDE/MDE file) if it was compiled in a different version of Access. This had a particularly painful impact on customers who accessed DBs on older versions of Access that were compiled by someone else on newer versions. They would see this error below:
The same issue may also cause an error with the text “Can't complete the output operation” when trying to export to text or Excel files.
This was covered in some of the tech blogs as well as user forums. The Access team saw reports from the community emerge late last week and worked over the weekend to get a fix in place and with the cooperation of our Access MVP community were able to validate the fix works in solving the issue.
We are happy to inform you that that fix is now live and available to 100% of all Current Channel customers which includes M365 Apps, and 2016/2019/2021 Retail users.
Over the next month customers using 2013/2016 MSI, Monthly Enterprise Channel, Semi-Annual Channel, and 2019/2021 Volume License versions will be getting this fix. We recommend you refer to this support article to see the latest information of the fix rollout
We can assure you we are working with the Visual Basic for Applications team, who built this security patch, to ensure Access testing scenarios are updated to prevent this from happening again.
Thanks to all of you for your help in reporting this issue and your patience as we worked through these issues. Please let us know if you are still seeing this issue.