What's up .DOC?

[FreewheelinFrank]

The security industry scrambled last week to react to Microsoft's announcement of a zero-day attack on Microsoft Word. Then MS announced another one.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=2716711

Is MS Office becoming a zero-day liability all year long?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=390

OfficeCat is a command line utility that can be used to process Microsoft Office Documents for the presence of potential exploit conditions in the file.

http://www.snort.org/vrt/tools/officecat.html

[OrangeCrate]

As an alternative to MS Office, OpenOffice 2.1 was released today. You can read about it, and download it here if you'd like:

http://www.openoffice.org

OOo reviews here:

http://www.openoffice.org/product/reviews.html

[.: Mac :.]

Just a Word of note to Mac users. The flaw affects Office for mac versions 10.x and 11.x(2004)

[OrangeCrate]

Though they don't address the Word situation, apparently something went wrong with some of the latest updates for Mac Office.

Read about it here:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/12/13/6279

Edit:

More info here:

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2006/12/13/information-on-accidental-posting-of-pre-release-security-updates-for-office-for-mac.aspx

[FreewheelinFrank]

As an alternative to MS Office, OpenOffice 2.1 was released today. You can read about it, and download it here if you'd like:

Thanks- already got it and use it. Seems fine for my limited word-processing needs. 

[OrangeCrate]

Seems fine for my limited word-processing needs. 

Yup, I agree with you completely. And yet, many people will continue to dole out almost 400 smackers (US) for MS Office, when OpenOffice is absolutely FREE.

I only use Writer and Calc. I don't know a thing about the other parts of the suite, so there might be some issues with conversion, but not for me.

Actually, I prefer the interface of OOo, and if you set the defaults to microsoft documents, you wouldn't even know you don't have MS Office installed. And a big plus, is that you can convert Writer documents to PDF on the fly!

[Lisandro]

I prefer the interface of OOo

Interface of MS Office 2007 is a completely mess for me... s**t 

[OrangeCrate]

Interface of MS Office 2007 is a completely mess for me... s**t 

I've read, that a lot of people feel the same way. 

IMHO, it's becoming apparent, that MS Office is beginning to buckle under the weight of useless bells, whistles, and backward compatibility issues.

[Lisandro]

Backward compatibility.

This is what botters me... Why change all the appearence without possibility of using the old, very configurable and very well-known toolbars...
I don't want to lose my toolbars  :'(

[OrangeCrate]

^, I'm sure you've seen this, or something like it:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/c6189fcd-3668-4cd7-8bac-5c37e338bde21033.mspx?mfr=true

Since I'm not about to get Office 2007, I just scanned the article, and didn't digest it completely, so I could be wrong...

If I read this right, I think it says, that if you are in a business environment, to communicate with older versions of Office, the answer for many who migrate to 2007, is that they will have to use a "compatibility mode", which of course disables many of the features in 2007... (or something like that  )

As I said:

IMHO, it's becoming apparent, that MS Office is beginning to buckle under the weight of useless bells, whistles, and backward compatibility issues.

[.: Mac :.]

Also the Macintosh XML converters will not be ready for quite a while (I think March-June timeframe). office for Mac 2007 is due to be released near the end of 2007.

[OrangeCrate]

^, I think I read that if you had installed the updates mentioned in post #3, that there is no way to uninstall any updates in Mac Office. You have to reinstall the program, and then reinstall any updates you want to keep (?).

That, coupled with your comment about the XML converters for Mac Office, certainly tells me, that program development for the Mac isn't a big priority for MS.

Thinking of alternatives for non-Intel Mac users...

Trying to port OpenOffice to OS X as I understand it, is not for the weak of heart, so NeoOffice would be an option. But, I seem to remember that you already have a copy of that installed.

For others, they might want to take a look:

http://www.neooffice.org/

Edit:

I just noticed that there's another thread running parallel to this one discussing OpenOffice. Glad to see there's a lot of interest in it.

[.: Mac :.]

OrangeCrate, MS does not really care about office for mac. That is why lots of Mac users use Openoffice or NeoOffice. (Both have PPC and Intel versions for mac)

Another thing is Office 2007 will no longer have VB support so lots of MAcros and automated actions will no longer be cross platform. MS Says that it is nearly impossible to port it to Intel and I call BS on that, a lot of Apps more complex than office have been ported with no problem (like Photoshop which the latest beta runs great on Intel macs and Final cut is also a very complex program that also runs great on intel.)

I think the problem is the MS just does not want to fully port Office to Intel and would rather drop features that are going to take a long time to port.

The intel transition is also why Windows Media Player for Mac was killed off.

[OrangeCrate]

^,

Interesting, thanks.