One method of opening strange attachments from trusted sources

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Whilst I was on holiday last week, a professional photographer friend of ours sent me a list of gear that he is selling now that he has switched from Nikon to Canon (come on Nikon, can we have a full-frame image sensor in a digital SLR please…). Unfortunately, he is a Macintosh user and the attachment arrived in Microsoft Outlook as a a .DAT file. Not having a clue what application he had created this list in, I opened it with Notepad and found the words Microsoft Excel Worksheet contained within all of the binary garbage. I opened the file again (this time in Excel) and hey presto – a list of equipment for sale!

Metro: read all about it!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A while back, I read that Microsoft is switching to XML-based document formats in the next release of Microsoft Office and I just read some more…

According to PDFzone, Microsoft is developing a new document format (codenamed Metro), which is:

  • A new document file format, similar in many ways to portable document format (PDF).
  • A spool format, suitable for spooling to a device through the print subsystem.
  • A page description language, similar to printer control language (PCL) or PostScript, that can be used to transmit the information all the way down to a printer.

Apparently it’s all part of the WinFX API, being developed as part of Windows Vista but also due to be released for Windows XP and Server 2003 and according to Paul Thurrott’s Windows Vista FAQ:

    “Based on XML, Metro is to Windows Vista as Adobe PDF is to Mac OS X: It’s a device- and application-independent printing architecture that allows documents to retain their exact formatting in any application, and when printed. Unlike PDF, however, Metro is based on XML and will be released as an open standard. Metro will also incorporate ZIP technology – similar to that used by the next major version of Microsoft Office – to compress and decompress files on the fly. From a technology standpoint, Metro includes an XML-based electronic paper format called Metro Reach, a document viewer for viewing, managing, and printing Metro files, the ability to digitally sign Metro documents, APIs that allow programmers to integrate their applications and services with Metro, a print pipeline, and a new driver model for Metro-compatible printers.”

Finally, an open document standard that doesn’t require an expensive application license to produce a document (I’m guessing as it’s XML-based, I could write Metro documents using Windows Notepad, edit.com – or if I was feeling particularly masochistic, I could use edlin.exe or the UNIX vi editor!). It will be interesting to see how this new format compares with DocBook.

Brian Jones’ blog has more information and links about the Microsoft Office Open XML formats in Office 12.

The return of WordPerfect?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Back in my student days I used MS-DOS 5.0 and WordPerfect 5.1. It worked really well. Then I moved to Windows 3.1 and Word for Windows 2.0 (Windows versions of WordPerfect just never made the grade). Obviously I was not alone because over the intervening 12 or so years WordPerfect’s fortunes have not been good until recently when the product’s current owners, Corel, persuaded OEMs to ship WordPerfect products as low-cost alternative to Microsoft Works and Office on new PCs.

Now the US Department of Justice (DoJ) is reported to have adopted WordPerfect Office 12 for its 50,000 users. The WinInfo Update reports that Corel has 20 million user worldwide, marketing WordPerfect for “its unique functionality, broad capabilities, and low price”.

According to Corel, “WordPerfect Office 12 is a full-featured office productivity suite that includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and address book applications”. Because it is compatible with popular file formats, including Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF, WordPerfect Office 12 users can interoperate with users of other applications and, unlike open-source office productivity alternatives such as OpenOffice.org, Corel provides support for WordPerfect.

But the killer (from a licensing perspective) is that Corel gives WordPerfect corporate licensees home and laptop privileges so they can install the same copy of the product at home and on a laptop in addition to a desktop computer.

Microsoft Office is still a highly profitable product for Microsoft and looks unlikely to be usurped from its top spot but with new releases of Windows running late giving Linux the opportunity to build its market share, Firefox rising in popularity (IE’s share now reported to be down to 87%), and new threats in the office productivity space, Microsoft needs to work hard to remain competitive and protect its margins. Competition is back, which is no bad thing, but there could be interesting times ahead.

Get Windows XP and Office 2003 in Welsh

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

(I went to Uni’ in Wales, so I feel duty bound to publicise this for my Welsh-speaking friends!)

Microsoft have worked with the Welsh Language Board to develop two new Welsh-language interface packs – one for Windows XP and another for Office 2003. They are free to download, and enable Welsh speakers to work more easily in their chosen language whether at home, in business or in education.

To find out more, visit the Welsh pages on the Microsoft UK website.

Shelling out to a command prompt from within an Office application

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier today I needed to shell out to a command prompt from a locked-down desktop PC. With only a limited set of icons and no access to the Run dialog from the Start Menu, I asked a colleague if he knew any back doors in the client build. He showed me this neat method for shelling out to pretty much anything you like from within an Office application:

  1. Open Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook or another application that supports Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
  2. Select Macro, then Visual Basic Editor from the Tools menu (or type Alt-F11).
  3. Select Module from the Insert menu and enter the following code in the Module window:
    Sub Main()Dim x
    x = Shell("cmd.exe")
    End Sub
  4. Select Run Sub/User Form from the Run menu (or type F5) and a new instance of cmd.exe will be launched.

The security implications of this could be severe, but as an administrator it’s a useful trick to know.

Removing hidden data in Office documents

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of months back, one of my clients came across an issue where they had a document which contained hidden information that they did not want to share publicly. In this instance, removing this information was proving problematic but now Microsoft have published a tool to do exactly this – the Remove Hidden Data add-in tool for Office XP and 2003.

The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool which may be used to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent the document is viewed in a Microsoft Office application. Microsoft recommend that the following notes are observed when using the tool:

  • You should only run the tool when you are ready to publish your file(s). This is because some of the data that the tool removes is used by Office for collaboration features, such as Track Changes, Comments, and Send for Review;
  • You should always save to a new file name, rather than overwrite the original file with the new document, in order to preserve a copy of the document containing the original data;
  • The Remove Hidden Data add-in does not work with Information Rights Management-protected or digitally-signed files.

Office 2003 SP1 and enhanced junk e-mail filtering for Outlook 2003 released

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week, Microsoft released Office 2003 Service Pack 1. The service pack includes the many public updates and hotfixes that have been released since Office 2003 debuted in autumn 2003 and adds fixes to several other problems that Microsoft hadn’t previously documented. It also offers some new security functionality including the addition of several file types to the list of those that Outlook blocks (noteably: .asp; .tmp; .vsmacros; .vss; .vst; .vsw; and .ws).

Along with the main service pack, equivalent service packs for OneNote 2003, Project 2003 and Visio 2003 were released, as well as an update for Outlook 2003’s junk e-mail filter allowing it to automatically update the safe senders list with outgoing messages’ recipients. This update replaces the outlfltr.dat file that controls the behaviour of the filter and provides a more current definition of which messages should be considered junk, based on Microsoft’s most recent analysis of mail patterns from the massive volumes of spam that Hotmail servers receive.