(Outflank also noted that antivirus software on both Macs and Windows "do not particularly bother about file format.")
#Office for mac 2011 activation issue for mac
That's not always the case with Office for Mac files, as the Amsterdam security firm Outflank (opens in new tab) discovered. In Microsoft Office for Windows, if macros are universally disabled, the XLM macros embedded in SYLK files will nonetheless not run unless the user manually authorizes them to. User authorization is a second line of defense against macros. If so, Office or Excel - for Mac and Windows alike - will not immediately spot the hidden macro and will open an Excel file in regular mode instead of in Protected View, which disables macros. It turns out you can embed an XLM macro (but not a VBA macro) inside a SYLK file. SYLK hasn't been updated since Ronald Reagan was in the White House, but it's still supported in Office. It's a 1980s-era format meant to transfer data among Office applications. Both VBA and XLM macros are flagged by Excel's security settings on both Windows and Mac.īut there's an even older file format called SYLK, short for "symbolic link" and with the file extension ".slk". Until 1993 and Excel 5.0, Excel macros were written and stored in a different format called XLM. Microsoft Office macros are today written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). To prevent this, macros are disabled by default in all modern versions of Office. In Word, you might create a macro to replace British spellings, such as "colour" and "gaol," with American spellings, such as "color" and "jail." You would just have to press a button in the Word toolbar.īut macros are a bonanza for hackers, who can embed malicious macros in booby-trapped Excel, Word or PowerPoint files. Macros, familiar to Office power users, are mini-scripts that let you automate repetitive tasks.