The result – hours of wasted time trying to ‘fix’ a problem. Looking at the Microsoft public information gave these paying customers no clue. The result was users updating to SP3 then finding their mail merges were broken. A good move really except that they didn’t bother to list the change in any of the original SP3 documentation!
Office xp service pack 3 Patch#
Microsoft decided to retrofit this same security patch into Office XP as part of the Service Pack 3. This problem was fixed in Office 2003, however some people need to access the feature the way it previously worked so Microsoft put it a ‘backdoor’ registry hack to let you use SQL strings the old way.Īll this is detailed in a Knowledge Base article which originally only applied to Word 2003. There’s a security problem in Word where an SQL query to get addresses for a mail merge can be misused by a bad guy. Here’s what we’ve been able to figure out – without any help from Microsoft. It makes a mockery of the public pronouncements of customer commitment when Microsoft can’t be bothered to properly document their software. It’s what we’ve come to expect but it is still mystifying and annoying. Long time readers of Office Watch will not be surprised, for rarely can Microsoft bring itself to admit the smallest error, and fixes or updates in public information are slow in coming. No acknowledgement of the problem and to date nothing has been done to properly document the matter.
We asked Microsoft for an explanation and after some days got what could be best described as an unresponsive reply. This is the only clue we had to a change introduced in Office XP SP3 – nothing in the list of changes, and the only mention of it in the Microsoft Knowledge Base applies to Office 2003. This message detailed the fix for an undocumented addition to Office XP Service Pack 3. In the last issue of Office Watch we mentioned a strange message from a Microsoft staffer in a public forum.
0 kommentar(er)
