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OIT Virus Notification Program
Virus Security for Microsoft Office
Macro viruses transmitted in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
documents are becoming more and more common, but there is a simple way of
gaining some protection from them. You can change your general settings so
that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will prompt you before running any macros
in any document you open. Here are the instructions for setting macro
protection in these programs:
Instructions for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office
97:
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Choose Tools from the menu bar.
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Choose Options.
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Choose General.
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Place a checkmark next to the box marked Macro virus
protection.
Instructions for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 2000 and
Office XP:
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Choose Tools from the menu bar.
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Choose Macro, then choose Security.
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Make sure security is set to High or
Medium.
In June 2001 and October 2001, security flaws in the macro security for
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were discovered. These flaws would allow
specially malformed macro code to bypass the macro security settings and
execute the macro without the knowledge or permission of the user. There
are patches available that will fix the flaws for the individual office
programs. You can get this patches from our
macro security flaw web page.
Microsoft Word 2000, Excel 2000, and PowerPoint 2000 are also vulnerable
to an attack from specially modified HTML files saved as Office
documents. Although this security weakness has not yet been exploited by
hackers, it is best to change your settings so that you are alerted when
Word, Excel, or PowerPoint tries to open and convert one of these files.
- Choose Tools from the menu bar. Then choose
Options.
- A window with several tabs will appear. Click on the
General
tab.
- Place a checkmark next to the box Confirm conversion at
Open.
- Click Ok.
To learn how to sign up to receive alerts via e-mail about any new viruses
that threaten the university, click on the Virus Notification Page.
To return to the main VNP web page, click on the the Virus
Notification Program FAQ.
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