Be careful with the Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers

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Tero Alhonen just tweeted about a new “feature” in the Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers that I hadn’t noticed before. Microsoft has viewers for Word
[See the full post at: Be careful with the Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers]

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Elly

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So apparently M$ is still fully committed to the malware model of software use/distribution.  They seriously never learn……

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Hardly new; it’s been around for at least two years, probably longer:

Be Careful When Downloading From Microsoft

How could this affect any browser other than IE?

What’s the big issue with other unchecked items?

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woody

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Nothing new here. This has been the Microsoft Way with these Viewers forever. Move along…

-- rc primak

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How is this different than, say, Chrome packaged with an installer and installing itself, changing your homepage and search to Google?  There are tons of installers have similar behavior (and the vast majority aren’t from the company whose program is being packaged with the one you want), so MS doing this is no real surprise to me.  (shrugs)

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Initially we ended up putting OpenOffice on store registers because several departments at home office send Word and Excel docs out to stores, assuming the stores can change the files and then email them back. When we switched POS vendors a few years ago, and they were ‘hands on’ (exclusively) with the image building and deployment, we were a bit shocked to realize they put the Office 2003 viewers on the registers instead of OpenOffice (or better yet, LibreOffice). I’m surprised these ‘viewers’ are still around.

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Oddly, MS never published a Word viewer that could read the OOXML .docx files directly, though the Excel and PowerPoint viewers were updated. Instead, the viewer for binary (.doc) files was used in combination with the Compatibility Pack. To me, seems like a lot of overhead for what should be a simple function. Questionable security, too, since holes have been patched in the viewers.

I’ve had good results using Open/Libre to open MS Office files, though the files sometimes need to be massaged. Note that OpenOffice will not save to the OOXML formats, but LibreOffice will.

See this interesting description of how MS isn’t being particularly helpful:

http://www.bhartiya.io/never-use-microsofts-ooxml-pseudo-standard-format/5815

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