Friday miscellany

Here's a Friday collection of sighted/cited pieces of interest:
Users running Microsoft Office can stump nearly three-fourths of all known attacks targeting the suite by applying just one three-year-old patch, according to recently published data. Almost three-out-of four attacks -- 71% of all those spotted in the first half of 2009 -- exploited a vulnerability in Word that was patched in June 2006, Microsoft said in its bi-annual security intelligence report, released Monday. The flaw was fixed in the MS06-027 security update issued. (~ PC World)
Here is very brief tutorial showing you how to set Firefox to open your bookmarks in a new tab, rather than taking over the existing one. (~ Simple Help)
"With hundreds of daily updates from friends on Facebook and Twitter, do people actually feel closer to each other? It turns out the average American is more socially isolated today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion, usage of cellphones and the Internet is not to blame, according to a new study." Well yes, except that the study also shows that people who use social networks such as Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors. (~ New York Times)
If you turn to your MP3 collection when you're stressed out, you're not alone. The American Psychological Association found that a majority of people polled for the last two years running claim music as their number one stress reliever. (~ Lifehacker)

Help make Microsoft Office better

Two Microsoft employees have created an online suggestion box where users can submit feature or fix requests for the Office suite of programs. MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unsanctioned site, was created by Steve Zaske, a planner on the Office development team, and Luke Foust, a Microsoft developer in the test group. "If you've got a new feature idea or an idea on how to improve Microsoft Office, please share it here," said Zaske and Foust in a debut message on the site. "[And] vote on other ideas you agree with. Through the magic of crowd-sourcing, the best ideas should rise to the top." Zaske and Foust acknowledged MakeOfficeBetter was not an official company effort, but said they would "do our best to get the ideas posted here in front of the right people within the Office development team."
My first suggestion would be to get back to basics and chop out all the features that scarcely anyone uses, so Word becomes less of a memory hog. My next would be a desperate plea to incorporate paragraph style sheets in PowerPoint - talk about antiquated!

Free word processors

A colleague has an ageing computer, which can run only an old version of Word. She can't afford to purchase a new version, so what to do? Fortunately, there is a large range of open source (ie, free) word processors available, some of which give Microsoft Office a hefty run for its money. The most popular is probably OpenOffice.org, which almost matches Word feature-for-feature, and in addition adds a few which Office does not have, such as a drawing program. In addition, it has an installed user base of millions of people, so there is plenty of help if you strike difficulties. A list of the best-known word processors is here, and most of these run on Mac and Linux as well as Windows.
A new Office package I have only just heard of, and which is not included in the above list, is The Fifth Element, from Ssuite Software. It apparently packs in even more features than OpenOffice.org. Certainly you can't lose by trying any of these (except maybe if you exceed your broadband download cap).

Microsoft Office service pack download

Microsoft has begun letting users of Office 2007 download Service Pack 2, marking a milestone in the company's document format battles with governments and other vendors. Office 2007 SP2 includes support for the OpenDocument Format, an open standard backed by many companies including IBM and Sun Microsystems but initially resisted by Microsoft. Customers who download the service pack will be able to save documents in ODF and Adobe Systems' PDF, just like they would any current supported file format in Office. They can also set ODF as the default file format. Previously, people could use ODF through a separate plug-in that translates Office documents to ODF and vice versa. Click here to download. Warning: The full Microsoft download is a hefty 290MB.

Opening ".docx" files

One of the hassles of Microsoft Word 2007 is that it creates documents in a new proprietary format which has the file extension "docx". Word 2003 can't open these documents, and neither can most other word processors (although I believe the latest release of OpenOffice.org can). A similar problem occurs with other products in the Office stable, eg Excel and PowerPoint. If you are using Word 2007, and sending documents to others who may not have the latest edition, I suggest doing a "Save as", in Word 2003 format. If you are faced with trying to open a .docx file and only have an earlier version, you can download a free compatibility pack from Microsoft which will add that ability to your system.

Password-protecting Word documents

Not many people realise you can lock Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, etc) so they can only be opened with a password. Great to protect family recipes or whatever from prying eyes. The method is much the same in both Word 2003 and Word 2007, except the buttons are located in different places. Here's the procedure:
1) Choose "save as" from the File menu.
2) Click on the "Tools" button, which I bet you have never noticed before. It's top right in the 2003 version of Word, and bottom left in the 2007 version.
3) Choose "General" options, and a dialogue box will pop up in which you enter your password. You can also have a second password for modifications, so people can access to read but not to modify the document.
Warning: Don't forget that password, because the encription is so strong even computer experts probably won't crack it.