Office 2003 users are being advised that some of the security enhancements contained in Microsoft’s latest major update to its business productivity suite come at a price.
Once users install Office 2003 Service Pack 3, some older files in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Corel Draw formats will be blocked, warned Microsoft’s Viral Tarpara.
“Some older file formats, including some from Microsoft, are insecure,” Tarpara wrote in a recent blog posting. “The decision to block the formats is strictly to protect your machine from being compromised.”
Batch Conversion
Tarpara recommended that users convert their documents to Microsoft’s OpenXML file format through the use of the Office Compatibility Pack. A command-line tool called Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) is available for batch-converting a large number of files to the new format, he said.
“OMPM is great because it doesn’t overwrite the original files at all,” Tarpara explained. “It simply makes a copy of the file in the new file format so there is no risk.” For those comfortable with Registry editing, modifications can be made in the Registry to unblock certain file formats.
For many Office 2003 users, the changeover should not be a problem, said Michael Silver, research director at Gartner Client Computing. “The number and percentage of files being exchanged in Microsoft formats like Office 95 or Word 6 is minute,” Silver noted.
Big Problem for Few?
Nevertheless, he said, a small number of I.T. shops might be concerned about the older file formats that are still in use. “I don’t know what the latest versions of 1-2-3 and Quattro files are, so I don’t know how old the file types removed are,” Silver added. If they are fairly old, they may cause a big problem for very few people.”
One user complained on Tarpara’s blog that Microsoft is making “security so hard that people…