[Esd-l] Another reason not to mail Office docs

[Scott Taylor]

At 11:59 PM 3/7/2003 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
>Just saw this in Tech Republic:
>
>"Microsoft Office metadata: What you don't see can hurt you"
><http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00320030304ggp01.htm>

That's really annoying for someone not logged into TechRepublic!  =P

>The general gist is that Office files are full of history and comments and
>other things you might not want your customers or business partners to see,
>and Office has no easy facility for scrubbing this stuff out.

They just keep getting scarier and scarier, M$.  But we already knew that 
right?  I'm sure that I read something in the Office 2000 Licence agreement 
to the effect that: by using this software, you agree that, all your 
personal information, revision documents, and PC is the sole property of M$ 
(;maybe not exactly;)

>One recommendation is that any document leaving your site go through a
>"publishing process" such as conversion to PDF or RTF.

That's a great idea, and also for the reverse.  Know of any way to do that 
without the users having to click or press any extra buttons?  How about 
spreadsheets and those annoying presentations that people are starting to 
email more of?

Only problem I can see is: as soon as we all start doing that, M$ will get 
all whiny and Office Blah will be released with the file structure all 
switched around and we'll have to guess at building a new parser.

Ugh!  What is taking the world so long to boycott these <insert nasty 
phrases here> M$ <insert more nastys>?

http://www.arachnoid.com/boycott/index.html
and
http://www.msboycott.com/
both have valid reasons.

:)

--
Scott.

The less users know, the safer they are!