Stan's List

Especially if you have moved Office applications from their installed folder. This MacInTouch reader nearly had a disaster:

Installed Home/Student fine on one machine (other than the permissions problem MS has already noted). On another machine, when it came time to ask about removing older versions of Office, it asked about removing one labeled something like “Applications (Trial)”. I told it to go ahead. The result is it put my whole Applications folder in the Trash. Thank goodness it was just putting it in the Trash, I yanked it back out to recover the folder.

Why did this happen? My best guess is I at one time pulled the “Remove Office” app from the Office folder into the apps folder. I looked and it isn’t there so I don’t know if that’s the cause, just a guess. However, I know I did this on the other machine that installed fine.

I looked on the MSFT site and I don’t see how to file a bug report so hope they read this. I didn’t find a reference to this problem in anything else I’ve read so far.

MacInTouch has a thorough review of Office 2008. Even though there are the expected issues, Office is given a very positive grade.

Office 2008’s new Elements Gallery and integrated Toolbox make the suite’s sometimes-bewildering array of features easy to find and easy to use. Microsoft marketing often talks about making “Mac-like” applications; Office 2008 is the most Mac-like version of Office since Word 5.1 … Office’s capabilities are vast, but until now much of it has been hidden among a maze of menus and byzantine dialog boxes. Office 2008 brings it out and shows it off.

ars technica has screen shots, which show some of the “bewildering array of features”.

BetaNews reports Office will come in several versions. $150 for a basic Home and Student Edition, featuring the core applications and three user licenses without any of the extras. $500 buys the Special Media Edition, which will include Microsoft’s Expression Media digital asset manager, The suite will require an Intel, G5, or G4 Mac rated at 500MHz or faster, with Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later. More …

Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has announced a special offer for those buying Office 2004—the Super suite deal.

When you buy Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Standard Edition, Office 2004 for Mac Standard Edition Upgrade, or Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition, we’ll send you Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition (a $500 value) for FREE—you only pay shipping and handling.

Microsoft’s Office 2004 11.3.9 fixes an issue that causes Word 2004 to quit unexpectedly when you print a document, patching the Microsoft Component Plugin and WordPDE.plugin files. Download page.

Office 2004 11.3.8 update is required as a prerequisite.

Symantec has discovered an exploit that crashes older versions of MS Word and could give a hacker access to the affected system.

We tried using various combinations of Word versions, patches and languages, and in each case (with the exception of Office 2007) opening the document would cause Word to crash,” said Orla Cox, a Symantec Security Response engineer. “After taking a closer look, we could see that the document contained shell code and three other pieces of malware. What was interesting about the document was that it wasn’t in OLE format, meaning that it wasn’t a standard Microsoft Office document. After some investigation we determined that the document had actually been created using Word for Macintosh.”

After some investigation we determined that the document had actually been created using Word for Macintosh. Here you can see the difference between the header in an OLE (Windows) format document compared to that of a Mac format document.

It was then that we had a “light bulb” moment, because we knew that just yesterday Microsoft had released a patch for a vulnerability in Word for Mac documents. (See Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-060.) Taking a closer look at that vulnerability, we confirmed that this document was in fact exploiting the same vulnerability.

 Update: the vulnerability is for Windoze only

This update fixes a vulnerability in Word 2004 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (KB941809).

Applies to: Office 2004 Standard Edition, Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition, Office 2004 Professional Edition, Word 2004. Download page.

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.7 Update. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Actually, January 15th, the Tuesday, of MacWorld week (Oct 5th’s deadline for free registration is quickly approaching). Prices run from Mac Home and Student Edition ($150), which includes three licenses for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, to the premium $500 package, called Special Media Edition, includes photo and video editing software, the Associated Press reports. More …

iLife and iWork should supplant some of the more expensive versions

From M$$$$’s Mac Business Unit, the gaggle that’s too busy to get Office ‘08 out the door in a timely fashion:

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

Via AutoUpdate or direct download,

This about whether iWork will do the job, as most do not need the full functionality of Office. It is why AppleWorks (formerly Clarisworks) has lasted so long and still popular.See “A Brief History of ClarisWorks“.

Last MacWorld, I chided the Mac Business Group about not releasing a XML converter. Now in August, with the release of iWork 08, Apple has done what they could not. The cooperation agreement does have some benefits. ComputerWorld agrees and reports on the difficulty of converting Office for doorstops to Mac. The XML conversion and Office 08 for Mac could be related.

MacWorld 2008? Office 2008 was due this month. Likely it was not nearly finished. InformationsWeek’s Apple Unvarnished keeps it all in perspective. Is this going to hurt any one but M$$$? More …