Word documents security

If you are a Microsoft user, you probably don't care when people send you Word documents as email attachments.

You probably also don't think twice about sending such attachments yourself, but you should. The first thing you should think about is that anything you DELETED from the original document is often really still there in the attached document, and although Microsoft Word may not show it to you, other tools can easily do so.

Don't think that someone has to deliberately try to access that deleted text. For the many of us who use Linux or Macs and do not use Microsoft Word, your document has to be converted before we can read it. Because Microsoft uses proprietary, completely secret file formats, the tools we use can sometimes make mistakes and show us things you didn't intend for us to see - worse, we may not even realize that you had deleted that part!

If you are using a new version of Word, people who have older versions of Word may not be able to open your document either, and even if they can, they may not see it formatted the same way as you sent it.

Some folks politely (or impolitely) refuse Word attachments. See http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/10/1711238&mode=thread and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kevin-cole-response.html

I'm not quite that stubborn, but I will tell you that it really annoys me when I get a useless attachment: an attachment that could have just as easily been typed into email. And if you send me something too new or too complex for my conversion tools, well, it's just a waste of time for both of us.

Do a "Save As" and make it text or PDF. Everybody can read text, and almost everone can read PDF.

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