Therefore, opening and saving these file types may pose a risk to you,' the revision read.

'By default, these file types are blocked because the parsing code that Office 2003 uses to open and save the file types is less secure.

Microsoft's rewritten Knowledge Base article also fingered the company's own code, not the file formats, as the security concern. Other downloads are available that reverse the file-blocking. The revised support document lists four downloads that users can run to unblock Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel files. 'We did not provide an easy way for end users to change this behavior so they could open these older files.' To make amends, Microsoft has posted several files on its Web site that automate registry changes. 'We also recognize that we have not made any of this as usable as we'd like, and we apologize that this hasn't been as well documented or as easy as you need it to be,' LeBlanc said. LeBlanc also echoed the mea culpa made Friday by Reed Shaffner, product manager for Office, who acknowledged that Microsoft had done a poor job communicating the changes to users, and had failed customers when it posted daunting work-arounds that required manual editing of the Windows registry. 'We didn't know where the issue was coming from,' Gerard Metrallier, Corel's director of product management, graphics, said yesterday.

cdr file format - still used by its CorelDraw graphics application - in last September's Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update.

He did not specifically name Corel.īut it was Corel that publicly squawked when it realized Microsoft had blocked its. 'Some of the formats blocked are from products built by companies other than Microsoft, and we apologize for implying that there were any problems in those companies' file formats,' said LeBlanc.

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