Beware of MS Office SP3
Ξ January 7th, 2008 | → | ∇ Technology |
MS has done it again.
The new MS Office 2003 SP3 update will silently and without warning, completely remove ANY access you might have once had to certain documents.
The service pack will block access to files including some Office Excel 2003, MS Office PowerPoint 2003 and MS Office Word 2003, as well as Corel Draw, Quattro and Lotus formats.
There are no warnings, no pop-up boxes, and, until recently, no easy way to undo once the service pack is installed because this fix directly modifies your system’s registry.
Following a huge outcry from various sectors, Microsoft has issued a “fix”, in the form of a knowledge base page, which will tell those who need access to the file formats how to re-enable access in the system registry (after telling you how dangerous modifying the registry is, at the end of the instructions) using automated scripts (yes, that is plural) or manually.
Apparently Corel users were especially P.O’d about this round of anal probing as MS was even handing out apologies, along with their normal excuses.
I took a stroll over to the Microsoft page (I enjoy slumming sometimes) to see what all this involved and it was a bit scary.
In order to regain access to the older files, you will either have to manually run a separate script to regain access for each file type OR you can happily muck around in your system’s registry and attempt to manually re-enable each file format, and in some cases each version of that file format, individually.
It is well worth noting, that access to these files is not restricted in Office 2007 as a work around has been included. Co-incidence?
So they have issued a service pack which supposedly fixes a flaw in their proprietary code and completely removes access to your documents including the ones saved in their proprietary formats.
Then they issue fixes for the fix which may or may not give your system a serious anal probing.
Microsoft has maintained it’s position that the fix was necessary to fix a security issue in the way Office 2003 parses these file types.
I think what they really tried to fix was their profit margin.
If they can break Office 2003 badly enough, users will have no choice but to “upgrade” .
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