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Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats
time961 writes "In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives."
If you read the knowledge base article, you'll see that the default allowed old-version goes back to before even Word 95. PowerPoint 95, but not 97, is blocked. It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
However, I really have to question whether the enhanced security is worth it, since those old versions didn't allow too much of embedded scripting anyway. Are we just worried about buffer overflows, because those are still a symptom of their parser, not the format itself.
The software nanny continues to keep us from hurting ourselves... gee, thanks. (Hmm, anyone smell a similar trend in government lately?)
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The minute a user tries to open these retired formats and cannot is the minute they start looking for another solution to open their files. This will help the install base of a lot of alternatives, which may have some staying power once installed. Programs like Abiword, OO.org and Gnumeric are all waiting in the wings.
If you have documents that old, and they don't need to be edited in the future, you should probably convert them to PDF.
If they may need to be edited in the future, perhaps LaTeX or ODF would be good choices.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
Oh the joy and expense of unlocking your intellectual property from someone else's intellectual property when the owner of the file format decides to abandon it.
Wasn't "bakward compatibility" the whole crusade they were on last year? "We must preserve support for old formats, which is why we won't make IE standards compliant, and our spec has to back-support IndentsLikeWord95" and the rest?
Their sneaky brand of evil is saying two conflicting things and making us believe they work together.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
with MS your files are accessible for however long they decide they should be, with FOSS, they're accessible as long as anyone is alive capable of re-compiling the source.
This is the point that people miss. All of the documents that were archived in the older formats will no longer be openable -- in this case, there is an arcane incantation as a workaround, but what if MSFT removes support entirely so that an authoritative document conversion is no longer possible? With open source, the method is obtainable. With closed source, it may be deleted when the company no longer supports it or closes its doors.
There are many cities/states/countries that rely on MSFT formats for document archival. Should a city keep spending money every 5-10 years to also update the formats on all of these records in case the necessary closed-source software ceases to exist or work on modern computers?
Funnily enough, the thing that finally, permanently, won me over to open document formats (I first used things like openoffice simply because they were free) was discovering I couldn't open my dissertation (written in word 5.1a for mac) on a standard install of office for windows. Yes, I know there's converters, and yes, I know current versions of word for mac can still open 5.1a documents, but I didn't have a mac at the time, and laboriously 'converting' the large numbers of transcripts, notes, papers, and all the other ephemera of writing a dissertation was a huge, timewasting PITA..
After that, the penny dropped. Using open document formats wasn't simply a way to save money, it was an actual necessity for anyone planning to have a career lasting more than 5 years where writing is a core part of your work.
Any government organization or large corporate that has a necessity to retain records has to convert their archives to a newer version. Who is paying for the conversion? Also, Office 95 is 13 years old. If someone upgraded to Office 95 by 97 (for service pack / stability etc) it is 10 years old. Given the investment in the software, if you assume someone used it and upgraded directly to office 2003, then the documents that are affected are less than 5 years old...
Bill Gates has how many billions of dollars?
(Can he fire the Ballmer?)
Gates could afford to build a special fork of one of the Linux or BSD distros. (Linux would require less work, but he may find the BSD licensing more palatable, as we know.) He could afford to develop several sandboxed WINE environments capable of emulating the clot of software relevant to each OS release from 3 to whatever level of support he is dropping. He could afford to put into the packages for this special fork open source converters that would convert old documents to whatever is current at Microsoft (since he is not likely to be willing to convert to the more logical option). And, as a bonus, he could even provide software to check the sandbox for damage and report and repair it. (Actually, the repairing would not really just a bonus.)
Why doesn't he do it?
Dang, and why doesn't Apple make MOL an official product? Or even MOM?
This doesn't make sense to me. A file format doesn't have buffer overflow vulnerabilities, the program that opens it has them. A file format cannot execute a virus or a trojan, the program that opens it is the one that does it. I cannot believe that a file format can have inherent vulnerabilities that cannot be circumvented by the program that reads the file.
On the other hand, considering the ODF vs. OOXML format wars, it seems to me that Microsoft's objective with this is actually to press for the standardization of OOXML. How exactly I don't understand, since the whole point of standard document formats is to avoid this same problem that they've just created.
This is exactly why proprietary formats are bad, at least for documents that need to be kept for a long time for some reason, such as archival or historical documents. Even if open source office applications do similar things and depricate support for old formats, the older application versions might at least be available. Or third party developers could more easily create conversion programs. While open source programs do also exist to read these old proprietary documents today, we don't know if future proprietary document formats will be able to be supported. The open formats will be supportable.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In 25 years you will still able to use an open ISO standard or convert from one standard to another. Microsoft jsut proved to you they are unreliable for the goal you had (forward compatibility).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
...for demonstrating why we need ODF.
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I don't know if I'd characterize it as "mind-bogglingly complex". It's a series of registry edits.
I would. The average slob (who could very well be someone who doesn't update their old files for long periods of time) using windows does not know what the registry is, let alone how to modify it. Also consider this: What is more dangerous and likely to cause serious damage, an old file format or a average user trying to fix their registry to read old files?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Given that Apple seem to end support after 6-7 years, and there's no evidence that any OSS offering will extend support that far back, why is there suddenly an outcry with Microsoft stopping support file formats which are now over a decade old?
Seems to be bloody-minded hypocrisy.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
He's right... their excuse is a joke. It can't be that hard--especially considering the huge profit margin on Office--to figure out a way of opening these file formats securely. It's not even executable data, for pete's sake! And if they *are* talking about macros or something, well then just disable the macro part until you figure out a way to sandbox it.
The richest tech company in the world is throwing its hands up in the air and saying that can't figure out how to make its most profitable (and presumably most actively developed) products render a human readable, non-executable data format safely--PLEASE. This is nothing more than a very clumsy (but brazen) attempt to make people upgrade. I'm surprised they have the balls to do it, what with their current OOXML circus.
Apparently, you don't know what XML is. You can encapsulate ANYTHING with XML. It's just a bunch of tags that have no meaning until you describe what the tags encapsulate. And then there are binary blobs, which don't mean jack because they don't get described as anything else besides a binary blob.
I did a little bit of Googling just so I don't put my foot in my mouth too firmly here.
It is a fact that binary blobs are allowed in OOXML as well as ODF. The MS/OOXML rabid fan site ooxmlhoaxes even stipulates this. No argument there.
BUT, in the article GNOME/OOXML podcast shows two sides closer than appears, these binary blobs that MSFT have are NOT specified in a publicly accessible document (if they ever were documented). While the thrust of the article was about software politics and the podcast itself, it did have a few nuggets for our conversation.
Now, if MSFT is allowed to just grandfather in undocumented binary blobs into OOXML for whatever reason, is OOXML truly an open format?
OOXMLhoaxes would have you believe that ODF has this same problem:
But, this is of course shenanigans. ODF is based on an open source package. Since the package is open source, we all know the code that would create the binary blob and can document it and recompile it. MSFT has not offered the code to authoritatively read their own binary blobs. And let's not talk about reverse-engineering being viable for use by large companies. This would open them up to patent lawsuits if MSFT chose to go that route.
From the same blarticle:
So, Office 2003 also has undocumented binary blobs? Well, so much for XML making it easy for one to decode previous Office formats.
Looks like I won't be chewing on my foot after all. Here's the search I did to find out about the OOXML undocumented binary blob problem in case you'd like a starting point.
don't use rtf. there are hundreds of different rtf extensions and no one knows which ones will be supported by microsoft in the future. if you want to store information for the foreseeable future you can use a standard ascii-text or utf8-text, tex, html or odt and that's about it.
No, the basis for complaint is valid.
You paid real cash money for something to work a certain way, and it did, until your proprietary-vendor overlord makes up some crappy reason for removing the functionality.
While the specific instance of removing support for ancient formats isn't likely to have too much catestrophic effect, the precedent is well worth bitching about.
The least Redmond could do is turn the converter code over to the public domain, so that, when the unforseen requirement to, say, compare ancient versions of Uncle Hezekiah's will suddenly crops up, people don't have to spend a ton of money to open a simple file.
Of course, there is the business model of having a stable of ancient computers with creaky Windows versions and applications, just for these moments, but that business is so boring as to be hideously expensive.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What you are all doing is making the mistake of assuming that the user is in a large organisation with an IT support dept that will do the work for them. Well a lot of people that use Office are not in that situation. The procedure may not be mind bogglingly complex for an IT support person, but the average person would be scared and confused from the get go with the instruction to backup the registry, never mind run ORKSP3AT.exe
And for what? The excuse that these are insecure formats is a lie. It's just data. If Office 2003 is vulnerable to exploiting old file formats, that's Office 2003 code that is insecure.
The best lesson that users can learn from this is don't ever upgrade Office.
It seems that just because it is Microsoft you're whining about people objecting to losing functionality , I hope people object regardless of whether it is Microsoft or Apple or Linux if functionality is removed without consent or choice (I do appreciate it is not as easy to have that happen with the open source model, one of it's strengths - and yes, it does have weaknesses too).
BM3
Data obsolescence is a huge problem. MS doesn't give a damn, their business model is to sit between you and your data. (OOXML versus ODF.)
Apple also did something like this (or worse) when they EOL'd Classic in Leopard. Millions of files become inaccessible overnight because the applications to read them simply cannot be run. It's thoughtless and cynical and extremely destructive.
The summary is not alarmist. Data obsolescence happens every day. It's a fatal flaw in the proprietary software model that RMS correctly identified decades ago.
you had me at #!
Your clients are wrong. You can download a compatibility pack and readers for Office 2007 documents for Office
Do you really think that you are going to tell a multi-million-dollar customer, "Do it our way, or you can take your millions of dollars of business elsewhere?"
The customer is always right.
According to the Knowledgebase article:(Emphasis added by me.) Now, if you look at the provided handy table of values, you see that the two versions of MS Word for Mac that are directly compatible with OS X, registry values 195 and 268 (for Word X for Mac, and Word 2004 for Mac, respectively) are below the default cut-off on the table. In fact, even Word 98 for the Mac (which can only run on OS X in Classic) falls below the cut-off on the table. Only products with corresponding values from the table numerically below 101 (those appearing above the cut-off line in the table) will be blocked.
Since Office 2004 for Mac is still a supported product, it would be insane for Microsoft to block its files from being loaded in the Windows version of Office. I admit these instructions are confusing, but the KBase article clearly does not say what you claim it is saying.
Incidentally, according to the table and the above quoted text, the only Mac Word document formats that are blocked by default in this service pack are the following:
- Word 4.x for Macintosh
- Word 5.x for Macintosh
And that's it. Even Word 6 for Mac isn't blocked, because it falls after the magic cut-off.