In addition to Suzanne's pointers to the better KB articles, I'd like to
correct a misapprehension. You wrote
I find this action by Microsoft very unfriendly. I have been using
Word since it first came out. I don't think it's my responsibility to
load and resave all of my old documents every time a new release of
Word comes out.
That's not what's happening here. There is no need to resave the documents
even once, let alone "every time a new release of Word comes out." Microsoft
engineers determined that -- quoting
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810 -- "the parsing code that Office 2003
uses to open and save the [old] file types is less secure". For reasons that
the article doesn't mention, they decided to disable that code rather than
rewrite it in a secure manner. They left it up to you to decide whether to
take the risk -- a very small risk if you open only your own documents, but
maybe a larger risk if you don't know where the old documents have been.
I agree that the chase 'round the barn to find the right KB article is
pretty poor, but it is a one-time thing.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ:
http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
Sesquipedalian Sam wrote:
I have been doing some cleanup of old documents. I tried to open one
document and I got an error message about the filetype having been
created by an earlier version of Word and it being blocked by a
registry setting.
The message inside the box is:
"This error occurs if you try to open a Microsoft Office document and
the file type for that document has been blocked by a registry policy
setting. To help secure your computer, Microsoft or the administrator
of this computer implemented a registry policy setting that prevents
opening this type of file.
To open documents with this file type, disable the registry policy
setting. For more information, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article
922850."
Clicking on the hyperlink, I am taken to:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=922850
This contains a lot of complicated information about changing the
registry. I am reluctant to make registry changes.
Is there any downside to making these registry changes?
What's the best way to handle this situation?
I find this action by Microsoft very unfriendly. I have been using
Word since it first came out. I don't think it's my responsibility to
load and resave all of my old documents every time a new release of
Word comes out.
Is there a utility that will scan my hard disk, locate all documents
saved with unsupported versions of Word, and offer me the chance to
convert them?