More Reasons to Hate MS Word

[the_gneech]

As if anyone needed any. Look at all the extraneous and probably confidential data MS Word hides in its documents!

Snagged from dewhitton.

-The Gneech <-- wonders what possible use a word processing document could have for my social security number

Comments

Asimov's Law

[inner-linbo.livejournal.com]

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity."

Microsoft's coders have always been careless. You include something such as an 'undo' feature and so you stash that data somewhere in the document. You forget to erase it on close, and all of a sudden it's there forever. The documents bloat but memory's cheap, right?

Of course, no one's yet tallied the economic cost of having to deal with Microsoft's bloated documents over more efficient alternatives.

As for confidential data, I'm certain that someone was certain that document tracking would be necessary, so the document pulls in the information on each writer/editor. If you happened to have filled in the SSN box somewhere, it gets included.

I brought this type of effect up in another friends journal. At that time you could click on any record on the Guiness Book Of World Records site and get a "break this record" button (this has now been eliminated). Even the record for the 'Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Act'. The implication is monstrous, but the question is who's the monster? Was the coder that created the script that places a "break this record" button on every record page the villian? He or she was just following a request for functionality. Who's job is it to consider the implications of processes? You here, likely, have a coder at Microsoft told to track those that alter the document, so they choose to fetch the ID data for that user, not really caring what that data is.

All the world is unintended consequences.

[makovette.livejournal.com]

vi Ownz U ;-P

Interesting, if a bit over alarmist. All this has been /.'d to death many moons ago, sot it's a bit stale too.

Who's using Word '97 anymore?

CYa!
Mako

[hantamouse.livejournal.com]

Half the supervisors and admin staff in my office.

The "Update Staff to OfficeXP" task is below the priority event horizon.

[karou-windstalk.livejournal.com]

And I'm not certain if it's been totally fixed for the XP version either, just made harder to retrieve.

then again, my version of MS Word stores things a little differently .. different platform and all ^_^

[hantamouse.livejournal.com]

Well, ok, my version of MS Word is ClarisWorks 4 which I like better and still runs perfectly in OSX despite being 12 years old.

[elektron.livejournal.com]

I'd use ClarisWorks 4 but I don't like booting into classic (but I used it up til about summer last year).

Word (all the copies I've ever used anyway) has an annoying habit of saving the path of the file in there somewhere. I don't know about other 'metadata' though (nor would I call a SSN 'metadata').

And then, empty documents are already 20K, so it's too bloated for me.

Government

[laurie-robey.livejournal.com]

We still have government clients who use Office 97.

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Me! Software's expensive! I run a copy of Office 97 'cause my dad gave it to me free.

-=TK

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

If you have linked office programs, such as Micro$oft wallet, that information is shared between word, excel, outlook, wallet, and several others. So if you have wallet open when you have word open, and your SSN is stored in wallet, Word can read it and embed it in documents.

The intent of the metadata is to establish propriety on a document. Unfortunately, it is not designed well. The cases of deleted text come from the fact that Word was not coded properly as a text editor. When you save text, it often times creates a second document field inside the file, rather than removing the original. I would imagine this was from a failed version of recovery programs that was never cleaned up. It's an unfortunate side effect, but an even safer technique of protection is to not share MS documents.

As always, abstinence proves the safest route. ;)

-=TK