I have Microsoft Office 2002 at home, and Microsoft Office 2007 at work, and I’ve noticed the same annoying thing in both of them. I can write a macro in either version of Word, and I have no problem opening Word, or using the macro. But in Excel, the system panics because the macro might be evil. Please note that these are macros that I wrote myself, not ones that got imported or installed (though I can see how the software might not know the difference).
Specifically, it warns me that macros have been disabled, and the only way I can get the macro to run is by either allowing the macros every time I open Excel, or by lowering my security to a dangerous level which allows ALL macros. There’s also some technospeak about getting a Security Certificate, but only vague instructions on how to do that; it seems to involve outside companies like VeriSign.
I am surprised that I should be required to work with a third party in order to use a native feature of MS Office. I’m also surprised that the security is so tight in Excel, but so lacking in Word – can’t the malicious code be run in either version? Why is Microsoft so worried about one and not the other?
I note that the different versions are Word and Excel, not between Office 2002 and 2007. You can’t tell me that the change was put into one on a test basis, because each is still the same five years later.
So my two questions are these:[ul]
[li]Is there some reasonable explanation why Word and Excel are so different?[/li][li]Is there a simple way to change Excel to be like Word, so that I don’t have to explicitly allow the macros every single time I open Excel - without lowering my general security level?[/li][/ul]