Safe ways to handle MS Office docs

[shmu26]

Sometimes you receive a Word doc in your email, and you need to view it or print it, and the Gmail file viewer is totally messing up the layout. What to do?
Forward the message to your Office Online email account. It has excellent support for Office docs. You can view the doc and print it without it ever touching your disk.

If you don't have an Office Online email account, but you have Dropbox, you could upload the doc to Dropbox, and from there, you can open it in Office Online.

 

[treisss]

or open the docs in sandboxes/UWP office

 

[Ink]

What is Protected View?

Files from the Internet and from other potentially unsafe locations can contain viruses, worms, or other kinds of malware that can harm your computer. To help protect your computer, files from these potentially unsafe locations are opened as read only or in Protected View. By using Protected View, you can read a file and see its contents and enable editing while reducing the risks.

Find out more

 

[shmu26]

What is Protected View?


Find out more

Protected view is great, but you can't print.

 

[509322]

Protected view is great, but you can't print.

Hmmm, yes... typical convoluted non-working solution by Microsoft.

 

[LDogg]

Protected View is great for some clients who work away from home. Plus sandboxing can help.

~LDogg

 

[Andy Ful]

The good alternative to online services, can be on Windows 10 the installation of Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, and PowerPoint Mobile - free Microsoft Universal Applications from Microsoft Store. They can block the active content in documents and run fully in AppContainer. The documents can be printed from those applications, too. The user can also copy the document content and paste to another office application.

 

[shmu26]

The good alternative to online services, can be on Windows 10 the installation of Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, and PowerPoint Mobile - free Microsoft Universal Applications from Microsoft Store. They can block the active content in documents and run fully in AppContainer. The documents can be printed from those applications, too. The user can also copy the document content and paste to another office application.

Yeah, that works.

 

[mkaz]

Being extra cautious, I agree with Ldogg, Sandboxing is the way to go. I was reading an article about this RAT trojan which is easily pentrated into the devices without even being detected by antivirus

Plus sandboxing can help.

 

[shmu26]

Protected view is great, but you can't print.

So today I made the great discovery that in MS Outlook, you can run a "quick print" job on a Word doc you received by email, while the doc is still in protected view. ‏‏

 

[mkoundo]

app guard for office looks promising:

Office 365 to Prevent Malicious Docs From Infecting Windows

 

[shmu26]

app guard for office looks promising:

Office 365 to Prevent Malicious Docs From Infecting Windows

Yeah, it sounds good! The way I suggested has a limitation regarding PDF docs: if Edge is your default PDF viewer, you are okay, but if it is Adobe Reader, you are out of luck. You can't open and print in protected view.

 

[shmu26]

So today I made the great discovery that in MS Outlook, you can run a "quick print" job on a Word doc you received by email, while the doc is still in protected view. ‏‏

I want to backtrack on this claim I made. Today I did a quick print from MS Outlook while MS Word was closed, and I noticed that Word appeared on the screen for a second. So apparently, the doc opens in Word and is printed from Word, which means AFAIK that it is not opened in protected view, because protected view can't print.

 

[notabot]

app guard for office looks promising:

Office 365 to Prevent Malicious Docs From Infecting Windows

I thought they'll only launch this for enterprise would love to have it on Win Pro/Office Home