MS Word: even more to worry about
If you send MS Word attachments by email, there is more than viruses and huge files to worry about. Keith Dawson’s excellent TBTF newsletter describes how your Word documents may be telling people more than you think. Word and other Office programs have notoriously inefficient file formats, and worse, may leave pieces of your other documents, or earlier versions of the same document, within the file. To solve 90% of the problems, turn off the “fast saves” option in Word (in Tools|Options|Save tab in Office 2000/Windows) Here’s the Industry Standard article that brought this up. I know people have been aware of this for a while (I have had Fast Saves disabled since Word 95) but it’s clear that, as these exploits become public knowledge, it’s even more important to watch what you send to whom.