But what if one needs to run the macros? [LWN.net]

But what if one needs to run the macros?

Posted Jun 14, 2007 20:20 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: BadBunny? Only if you invite it in by thoffman
Parent article: BadBunny? Only if you invite it in

Just don't click "OK!" if OO pops up a dialog box asking you if you want to run the macros in the document!

That seems very reasonable for most people.

I think it very unsatisfactory. For better or worse, the macros might be essential for fully getting the contents of the document. A related example: an ex-colleague once wrote a surprisingly short PostScript macro that when run, drew the very complex-looking logo the company used at the time, by observing how it had been put together from replicating some simple elements. A very effective way to compress into about two hundred bytes something that otherwise would take several kilobytes, even in vector form. An office suite macro might do something similar, and I think this is a very reasonable use for them: formatting the contents of the document itself for presentation without mucking about with anything external to the document and the window used to display it. I would like to allow it without questions, and at the same time prevent all potentially malicious uses.

It ought to be possible, provided office suite makers drop the idea that an office suite must be a complete application development environment, and go back to what 99.9% of the users really want to do with them: create and view documents.

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