Re: Macro warning message and unable to attach documents to emails

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In article <1182266687.040968.257290@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<samantha.pillion@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am a new Mac user and I am having a lot of problems with my
Microsoft Word 2004 (Student and teacher edition). In the beginning
there were no macro warning messages and I had no difficulty attaching
any of my documents to an email. More recently, however, almost every
time I open any word document a macro warning message appears and
whenever I attempt to attach any of these word documents to an email,
in both Gmail and Yahoo, it says that it is unable to attach it
because it contains a virus. I have tried copying and pasting the
contents of a word document into another blank one and then attaching
to an email and that does not work either.

I do not have any virus protection/detection software as I do not know
which kinds are compatible with macs and I do not want to buy anything
because my college will be providing one in August.

Also, I have read through this group trying to find this problem
already answered and it appears all of the macro problems involve
people who actively make and use macros. I, however, have no idea what
they are or how to create them, so I fear this may be a macro virus
and I have no idea how to get rid of it. Any help would be much
appreciated.

It does look like your Word environment and your Word documents are
infected with a macro virus.
In practical terms, this is the only kind of virus that spreads on a
Macintosh. I have never heard of their influence spreading outside of
Microsoft Office on Macintosh, but as you have discovered, they leave
it acting like a Typhoid Mary of the computer world - transmitting
disease to those less fortunate souls not running OS X.

I suspect the only way to deal with that mess without an antivirus tool
is to delete the "Normal" file in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/ and
all your Word documents, empty trash, and restart your Mac before
restarting Word or any other Office product. The restart should cause
your Mac to forget about a sneaky temporary file copy of your Normal
that may lurk on your machine.

If you save fresh copies of your documents as RTF (Rich Text Format)
before you start that procedure, you may be able to convert them back
to virus-free Word docs afterwards. I don't think RTF files can harbour
a macro virus, but I have no first hand knowledge of that.

There has been a lot of discussion about Word macro viruses on Mac in
this newsgroup. Google groups advanced search will dig it up.
Try this:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=&num=10&scoring=r&as_epq=macro+viru
s&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_ugroup=microsoft.public.mac.office.word&as_usubject=&
as_uauthors=&lr=lang_en&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=19
81&as_maxd=19&as_maxm=6&as_maxy=2007&safe=off

That ghastly url is that of the the search results for exact phrase
"macro virus"
over group microsoft.public.mac.office.word
at http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search

Not everyone agrees on causes and remedies as you will see. Indeed some
of the more pessimistic authors there would claim my procedure was
ineffective. I'd be interested in your results.

--
To de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$
PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248
.

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