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Word Gripes |
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September 7, 2004. Kill Microsoft Word By John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine
February 20, 2004. According to the free Woody's OFFICE Watch
newsletter, Word 2003 can not save documents in WordPerfect format. Direct
link. It says that many lawyers still use WordPerfect and that they charge extra if they have to figure out a way to transform
Word documents. It can though open a WordPerfect file. Previous versions of Word
could save documents in WordPerfect format.
The Biggest Word 97 Security Hole Yet? Woody's Office Watch. September 6, 2002. By Peter Deegan.
Alex Gantman reported on Bugtraq that he's discovered an interesting way to use Word fields to steal a file. The security hole describes only affects Word 97. In a nutshell, if you use Word 97, and somebody sends you a document asking you to modify it, be aware that when you return it, the Word document may contain a hidden copy of files from your computer. The Word document will not be flagged by anti-virus programs as containing a virus. It will also not appear to Word97 as having any macros.
Microsoft's Conundrum with Word 97 Spyware. Woody's Office Watch. September 12, 2002. By Peter Deegan. This is a follow-up article to the earlier one. Quoting:
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"I'm tellin' ya, folks, it's the worst Word security hole I've ever
seen. Far as I'm concerned, this security hole renders Word 97 essentially
useless - downright dangerous, in fact - in any corporate environment, and close
to useless anywhere else." |
Microsoft warns of thieving Word docs CNET News.com September 12, 2002. A security flaw in Microsoft's flagship word processing software could allow a document to hijack files from any Windows PC on which it's opened...The scheme works best under Word 97, but Word 2000 and 2002 could also be conscripted into service if the attacker can persuade a victim to print the document first...
Microsoft Acknowledges Word Security Problems PC Magazine September 13, 2002. The AP reports that Microsoft will not provide a fix for this problem for Word 97.
This is no longer a Word gripe, after all, all software has bugs. The real gripe here is the way Microsoft dealt with the problem. The rant at Woody's Watch continues:
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"The bad news: Microsoft hasn't done squat for its customers. There's a press release that MS posted in response to Ian Hopper's story for the Associated Press (good story, by the way) ... But as far as I know, that's the extent of Microsoft's missives to its customers. Three and a half weeks later, and there's no security bulletin, no official warning, no nothing. The only suggestion Microsoft has come up with - examine field codes in your document manually - is so lame I don't know if I should laugh or cry... or scream. Can *you* look at a field code and know if it will automatically suck in a sensitive file? How can hundreds of millions of Office users be expected to tell the difference between a safe field code and a spy? " |
Previous reports said the bug required the attacker to know a file name. Here they report that it is possible to retrieves the full file names of all documents which are already open when the "spy" document gets opened. The article also has gripes on the press coverage of this problem. September 18, 2002.
Another description of the problem How to Bug A Word Document by A.Lizard. September 26, 2002.
Some serious griping about the way Microsoft handled the security problems in Word. You would never trust them again after reading this. From Woodys Windows Watch. September 23, 2002.
Woody's Office Watch newsletter. October 9, 2002. Lies, Damn Lies, and Microsoft Paraphrasing: The October 8th issue of Microsoft's Inside Office Newsletter has a link to the same press release Microsoft posted a month ago about the security holes in all versions of Word. This is the first time Microsoft has notified its customers about the Document Collaboration Spy problem. Instead of telling something resembling the truth, all we get is more obfuscation. Only Microsoft would have the unmitigated gall to lie so blatantly, at this late date, and expect their customers to swallow it. I use the term lie quite deliberately, Microsoft is still making statements that it knew then and knows now are totally false.
FYI: Solving Word's Hidden ''Phone-Home Fields'' Problem. Information Week Magazine. By Fred Langa. October 21, 2002. Microsoft's "hidden field" patch still leaves a back door open. This article explains the problem and offers a two-click solution to close it.
August
4, 2000. This gripe occurred under Windows NT4 at Service Pack 6a with Word 97 at
Service Release 2 (a.k.a SR-2).
Once upon a time, I was minding my own business, running Word97, and started the NT task manager to look at memory usage. Lo and behold, I could not help but notice that the winword.exe process was hogging almost the entire cpu. This was intriguing because although Word was open and editing a long document, I was not doing anything in it at the time. How could I be, I was looking at task manager.
Having debugged many things over the years, I guessed at the problem pretty quickly. Word 97 has a feature that will check your spelling automatically as you type. It is controlled by the first checkbox in the window shown here on the right. (You get to this with Tools => Options => Spelling and Grammar tab) As this screen shot shows, this option was on. I turned it off and viola, my cpu is idle again. |
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To further prove this, take a look at the below screen shot of task manager. It shows the difference in cpu usage with the option turned off (on the left) and turned on (on the right).
August 5, 2000
I tried to duplicate this problem on another computer also running Word97 SR-2 under NT4 and could not. Then I went back to the initial computer, after a power-off and re-boot, to tweak the problem more.
Bringing up the same 65 page file that exhibited the problem yesterday, again caused Word to hog all the cpu. I let it run a while to confirm that it was not a temporary effect and the cpu usage never decreased. The effect is definitely caused only by the spelling checker, both grammar checking options were off. At times Word had 3 threads active, but usually there were 4. Task Manager showed that it was not taking page faults.
Then the big effect. I tried another document that was only 6 pages long. No problem. Doing a binary search, I next tried a third document that was 32 pages long. At first the cpu usage was normal, but very soon it surged up and stayed high.
October 25, 2000: This problem was replicated by a reader of this web site who claimed to be running NT4 on a P133 with 128 meg of ram. He also found Word97 to be eating cpu while editing a 137 page document and fixed the problem by turning off the real-time grammar and spell-check.
October 13, 2003: A reader of this web site wrote to say that this problem also exists with Word 2000. He was editing a 127 page document and found that Word was using all the cpu on his computer. Turning off spell checking and grammar checking, got the cpu usage down to normal. OS is Windows 2000, Service Pack 2. Word is version 9.0.4402 SR-1. I have not verified this myself.
January 8, 2004: Another reader had the same experience. He was writing a thesis, over 170 pages long. Outlook 2000 was using 100% CPU and when he closed Outlook, then Word 2000 started using 100% of the processor. The was under Windows XP Home Edition. Word was version 9.0.6926 SP3.
January 30, 2004: A reader in Germany (Peter Schaeffner) running Word 97 SR2 spent some time researching this and found that Word "goes haywire if the document contains more than 999 spelling errors." By haywire he meant that it loops and uses all the cpu processor horsepower on your computer.
June 3, 2004: Another reader also reported Word burning cpu with: Word 2000 9.0.2720 under Windows XP SP1 Build 2600.xpsp2.030422-1633. He claims it happens on very short documents (one to three pages) and has seen other Microsoft Office applications also hog the processor.
December 24, 2004: Another reader reported that when using Word X for the Mac Service Release 1 the live word count function keeps on counting even when there's nothing to count, that is, when their is no document being edited but Word is still runnig. She also said that this appears to have been fixed in Office 2004 for Mac.
April 15, 2005: Another reader reported that 100% CPU usage can occur with Word 2002 even with spelling and grammar checker turned off. There is a bug with line numbering in a non-standard format. Microsoft wrote about this bug: "The formatting in this document is too complex. Please full save the document now" error message when you edit a Word 2002 document . The solution is to upgrade to SP3 of Office XP.
July 14, 2005:
A reader of this page wrote to say that a five page document caused problems
with Word 2000 at SP3 and the latest updates applied to Windows XP. He found
that the problem was with the automatic spell check. But why such a small
document? He realized that the documents causing the problem had an extreme amount of foreign words in
them.
August 14,
2006. A reader of this page (thanks Herman) found the same problem on
a 1.6 GHz Macintosh using Word 2004 for Mac v. 11.2. Just like with Windows,
the problem only affects larger documents. He too found that turning off spell checking
fixed the problem of Word burning all the CPU cycles. While researching this, he
found this article http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060525082728653
that suggests turning off Spotlight searching of the 'Microsoft User Data' folder, but
it didn't work in his case.
Another gripe that occurred in the same environment is that when I do Help => About to see the version of Word97, it plays "The Microsoft Sound.wav". Its not at all obvious how to turn this off.
I first checked the Tools => Options => General Tab which has an option called "provide feedback with sound", but it is off. Then I checked the Word97 help and found two relevant topics. The first topic is called "Change toolbar sounds" and it says to use the sounds applet in the control panel. However, there are no sound events for Word97. The second topic is called "Turn off toolbar sounds" that says to turn off the "Provide feedback with sound" checkbox. As I just said, this does not work.
I confirmed this as a problem on another NT4 computer also running Word97 at
SR-2.
Update: A reader of this site has a solution - rename the sound file that
Word is looking for ('The Microsoft Sound.wav').
February 16, 2004.
April 16, 2001. Someone I know called today with a slew of computer problems. Error messages from Windows 95 about being dangerously low on system resources. Word 97 hanging at start-up such that the splash screen is the only thing the user sees. Windows 95 hanging and complaining about Word 8 not responding (thanks Microsoft, for calling the same product Word 97 and Word 8). Word 97 complaining that there was either not enough memory or hard disk space for it to run (both were not true - there was 600 meg of free disk space on the C disk and the computer had 64 meg of ram and was only running Word 97, nothing else).
Trial and error eventually narrowed down the problem to Word 97. The last software installed was a printer driver for a new printer but it had been working for a few days before these problems appeared. We restored all the Windows 95 configuration files to a point in time before the printer driver was installed. It did not help. We shut down all other programs from running. We ran resource meter and system monitor on the computer just after restarting Windows 95 and all was well. Still, Word 97 always hung at the splash screen.
By coincidence, I had recently read about someone else who struggled a whole day or more with Word and could not get it fixed even after un-installing it and re-installing it a couple times. That persons problem had to do with a corrupted Word file called normal.dot. Out of guesses, we found two copies of normal.dot on the computer in question, renamed both of them and re-booted.
All is well. Over a hour wasted.
Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. June 24, 2004. "Microsoft Office for Windows is the world standard for ... word processing, building spreadsheets and creating presentations. But Microsoft hasn't added any fundamental innovations for consumers to these core elements of Office since around 1995." In this article he liked Corel WordPerfect Office.
Scot Finnie's newsletter on June 12, 2001 described four gripes he had with Word 2002. In the July 24, 2001 edition of the newsletter, he describes applying one bunch of bug fixes to Word 2002 and then another bug fix which didn't fix the bug.
Fred Langa's newsletter on June 25, 2001 mentioned a serious bug that effects Word 2002, Word 2000, Word 97 and other versions of Word. He provides a link to Microsoft's explanation of the problem.
| Page last updated: August 14, 2006 |