Office 2003 SP3 blocks old file formats

Microsoft said this action was aimed at improving security but still confusing users.

Microsoft deliberately did not want access to some of the old file formats, including many created by its own products, which raised security issues for Office's latest service pack. 2003, the company recently announced so a few days ago.

Office 2003's three-month-old SP3 service package blocks old file formats for security purposes. Some older formats, including Microsoft products, are not secure and do not stand up to new hacker attacks to execute malicious code. Deciding to lock the format is absolutely definitive to protect a user's computer from being compromised. Viral Tarpara, a member of Microsoft said so.

Office 2003 SP3 was released in September and questions about file access error messages began to appear immediately on Microsoft support forums.

These questions kept coming out until December. A user complained that he called Microsoft support, but was told that it cost $ 250 to fix the problem. SP3 they caused. Eventually he had to uninstall Word 2003 and reinstall (because SP3 could not be completely uninstalled) and his problem was fixed.

Microsoft also posted a document on its support database that could customize the Windows registry to fully restore access to Office 2003 formats. According to Tarpara, the document stated that the file The lock has been made for security reasons. ' These file formats are locked because they lack security. They can pose a risk to users, 'according to the documentation.

Along with locked files are older formats of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as the formats used by Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro of Corel Corp. - long spreadsheet pair - and Corel Draw, an illustrative program. In fact Word 2003 locked to 23 previous formats, according to Microsoft, it includes the file formats from the default word processing for Office 2004 for Mac, the edition is currently being provided to the Microsoft suite for Mac. OS X.

IT administrators can download group policy templates from the Microsoft website to return to locked word formats, but for individual users or small stores, the Windows registry must be edited, A fairly difficult task that even Microsoft warns' Serious problems may occur if you change the registry incorrectly. Editing the registry can pose a risk to you . '

In a post sent to the company's blog a few days ago, Tarpara recommended that instead of conducting hard work on the registry, users should convert documents into OpenXML format - Office 2007's default format. - with tools available in Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), this toolkit can be downloaded from the Microsoft web site. " OMPM is a great set of tools because it doesn't overwrite the original files, but simply does a file copy in the new file format, so there won't be any risks ," Tarpara said. so.

Microsoft offered Office 2007 and its OpenXML file formats as a safe solution in the past few months. In last May, the company launched the Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment product, which is a tool for Office 2003 users so they can make a double file swap easily to help improve conditions. for older formats by temporarily converting them to OpenXML format.