Ms Office Tune Up

Macro security is quite stringent in Office 2007, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given the number of nasty VBA-based viruses and other malware that have spawned in the past few years. For a macro to work in Office 2007, the macro must come with a digital signa­ture that is both valid and current, and the macro developer must be set up on your com­puter as a trusted publisher. To set up a developer as a trusted publisher, click Options when you see the Security Warning information bar, click to activate the Trust All Documents From This Publisher option, and then click OK.

What if you just want to run your own macros? In that case, you need to sign your own projects and then set yourself up as a trusted publisher.

NOTE

To digitally sign your own VBA projects, choose Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Digital Certificate for VBA Projects. In the Create Digital Certificate dialog box, type a name (such as your own name) in the Your Certificate’s Name text box and then click OK.When the SelfCert Success dialog box appears, click OK. Now open the Visual Basic Editor, select your project, and then choose Tools, Digital Signature. Click Choose, click your certificate, and then click OK.

If that all sounds like too much work, but you don’t want to enable all macros, Word gives you a third choice: Store your macro-enabled documents in a trusted location. A trusted location is a folder that Word assumes contains only trustworthy documents, so it automati­cally enables any macros contained in those documents. By default, Word comes with three trusted locations:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Templates-This folder holds the application templates for all of Office.
%UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates-This folder holds the Office templates you create yourself.
%UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup-This folder holds the global templates that you have created yourself and that are loaded into Word auto­matically at startup.

None of these locations are particularly convenient, but it’s possible to set up a more suit­able folder as a trusted location. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Choose Office, Word Options to open the Word Option dialog box.
2. Click Trust Center.
3. Click Trust Center Settings. The Trust Center dialog box displays.
4. Click Trusted Locations.

NOTE

While you’re in the Trust Center, you might want to adjust your macro security setting. Click Macro Settings and then click the security option you prefer. If you’re going to put all your macro-enabled documents in the trusted location that you’re creating in these steps, you can click either Disable All Macros With Notification or Disable All Macros Without Notification.

5. If the trusted location is on your network, click to activate the Allow Trusted Locations On My Network check box.
6. Click Add New Location. The Microsoft Office Trusted Location dialog box displays, as shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1 Use the Trusted Locations page to set up new trusted locations in Word.

7. Use the Path text box to type the path of the trusted location.
8. If you want Word to also trust this location’s subfolders, click to activate the Subfolders of This Location Are Also Trusted check box.
9. Click OK.
10. Click OK to return to the Word Options dialog box.
11. Click OK.

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