• Be careful with the Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers

    Posted on February 27, 2017 at 07:06 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    Tero Alhonen just tweeted about a new “feature” in the Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers that I hadn’t noticed before.

    Microsoft has viewers for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. You can download and use the viewers for free, even if you don’t own Office. Some people prefer using the viewer over running the free Office Online programs.

    If you go to the official Word Viewer download site and click the Download button, you’re given the prechecked option to set MSN as your default home page, and make Bing your default search engine, in all of your web browsers.

    Your system may vary, but on my Win10 1607 system – running Office Pro Plus 2013 – I’m also offered Office 2007 Service Pack 3, the Office compatibility pack (which works with Office 2003, 2000 and XP), the latest MSRT KB 890830 (I have the Feb version installed already), and Internet Explorer 11 (on Win10 – hello?).

    The Excel viewer includes the same checked-by-default offer to change my default homepages and search engines, as does the PowerPoint viewer.

    Permit me to restate that. The official Microsoft Office viewers ship with a browser hijacker enabled by default.

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