Macro Hassles – Of97

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Hi guys hope you can help me out! I work for a media buying company in Australia. We use Off97 and management has no intention of upgrading our version of Office. The problem is, that when we send Word docs to our clients, they often get the macro protection warning and refuse to open our correspondence. When we have a look for htese macros, there are none to be found. Sometimes tools-macros is greyed out altogether. Furthermore, when we create new documents, even if they are one word long with no macros added, the warning comes up every time that document is opened. I’ve looked in the macro list for normal.dot and can’t see anything untoward.

I have tried telling our users and contacts that the macro protection feature is pointless and that they should switch it off. I have even pointed them to the MS site that recommends they switch the protection off, but to no avail. With all the bull**** that I have to go through daily with this bug, I’m getting desparate for a fix to this problem

Can anyone help?

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Hi Synaesthesia (haven’t heard that word since the ’60s!):

Whatever you do, don’t turn off the macro protection feature or advise others to do so! – it may have its flaws but turning it off is really looking for trouble.

I recently had a similar problem in Word 2000 where new documents were triggering a macro warning. I checked my PC for viruses and found none. I was able to make this spurious warning go away by replacing my Normal.dot.

Hope this helps,
Gary

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Heh… Re: “Synaesthesia” The Naughties (as we call em in Australia)- the 60’s pt 2. The 60’s v2.0?

Re: Normal.dot. Thanks for your advice. We’re throwing a fresh copy of Normal.dot to our file server & adding a routine to copy it to the local machines every morning via logon script. I’ll post back with the results for others with this concern. Thanks again!

S

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Hi S,

I hope that works for you. This does though get into another topic, which is:

You ought to kick the “Normal” habit and find another way to distribute your macros, customizations etc. to the users.

To cite just a couple of drawbacks:
Every morning you’re wiping out any customizations or other user fingerprints that have been saved to their Normal.dots – can’t be good for morale.
Normal.dot is prone to corruption and virus attack.

There’ve been a number of threads either here or on the VBA forum about alternatives to Normal.dot. (sorry it’s really late at night or I’d provide more info…)

Gary

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These are very good points that we hadn’t considered. It seems normal.dot is QUITE prone to virus attack. I have a more detailed explanation and info perhaps of some value to Sophos users with this problem as a reply to BAN’s post.

Thanks again Gary

S

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Hi Synesthesia,

You might want to look into global templates as well as other customized templates for distributing customizations. Global for things you want available in all of your documents, specialized for ones that have customizations that are used for some documents and not others. (Another possibility is global templates that are switched on as needed.) See: Template Basics (http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm) for more on templates (user and workgroup), global templates and Normal.dot.

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I have had similar problems with documents in Word97. I once read a MSoft article that said “The only cure is to start a new document and import the file (File, New; Insert, File)

In most of my cases I think the cause of the trouble has been my placing some macro code in the “This Document” module or similar, and then removing it. It’s *as if* Word remembers that there was once something there.

Anyway, as a test, start a new document, Insert one of the offending docs, save with a new name and send it off to a friendly user.

Let us know if that works.

I have a macro somewhere that does this automatically. I have a little app that will process every document on your hard drive (if you want, or a subset). You could hook the two togetehr and clean up all these problems overnight.

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Thanks I have included some response to your post in my reply to BAN. I will test & run your code over the coming couple of days. Since it seems that we have a virus that should be but isn’t being detected by our a-v software, I will explore a couple of other concerns first.

Your advice and help has been valuable and appreciated

S

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Perfect solution !!! and fast !!!

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Glad you liked it.

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Ok, mostly I’m curious after reading everyone’s post as to what synaesthesia is (I was born in ’69, so I evidently missed out on this one).

That aside, if you go into the VB Editor and look at This Document, is there any macro code in there? I got the sense that you hadn’t looked in there yet although I know it was kind of eluded to in chrisgreaves’ post. I know we’ve had users who thought they had cleaned out all of their macros but missed that one and still got the virus protection warning…

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Well firstly…
Synaesthesia – Main Entry: syn

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>Ran sweeps on infected documents and nothing came up infected,

[promotion]
I’ve been offering my solution to Word virus attacks for some time now. It’s free, it works, and it uses a DOS batch file, but don’t let the simplicity scare you.
[/promotion]

I load MSWord from a small BATch file (pasted below)

The batch file first copies the previous version of Normal.dot to a file OldNormal.dot (see below)

The batch file then copies a secure (renamed, read-only) file to Normal.dot before invoking Word.

I keep “macro virus protection” turned on.

If an incoming document contains a macro, I say “OK” and enable macros, let the document open, and then immediately shut down Word.

I immediately re-open Word (by the batch file, so the virus is now in OldNormal.dot) and inspect the OldNormal.dot by hand using the VBE.

I have had no virus infestations for three years.

About once every four months I get to advise a colleague that they are under attack before they even know about it.

REM Word97.bat Christopher Greaves Thursday, July 1, 1999

:: Re-create the Normal.dot prior to loading Word97

copy "c:program filesmicrosoft officeofficeNormal.DOT" d:OldNormal.DOT 

copy d:GREAVESN20010317.dot "c:program filesmicrosoft officeofficeNormal.DOT" 

"C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeWINWORD.EXE"  %1

REM end of Word97.bat

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>This Document, is there any macro code in there?

This will trigger it fer sure; I think my original (1 year ago) problems started when I had deleted (Ctrl-A, Del) the code in there, but a residual tag was left within the template itself.

If I understood the VBComponents Object in the Local Variables window more, I’d probably be able to track it down. It’ll be a data flag about 35 levels deep, I bet.

> eluded

“Escape from or baffle a person’s memory or understanding.”

Yup.

Thass’ me!

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