Forum: Author Hangout

I have not checked ALL of my folders and documents. However, all of the folders and documents I have checked, have been changed from MS Word to Office 365.

How do you know this?
If the association of the file extension (the part of the file name after the period) was changed, windows will display the icon of the newly associated program in front of the filename without making any changes to the file (document) itself.
So just start your old version of MS Word (if it's still there) as you would do to create a new document, then try to open one of the apparently changed documents using MS Word's menu (File; Open...). If the document opens, then you only have to go into Windows Settings and re-associate the file type (the extension) to your old program. Done!

Don't panic, stay cool.

HM.

ETA.
You probably can still use your old MS Word to open a document by right-clicking on the document and selecting "Open with...". The program list shown may still contain your old Word.

Can Office365 be considered to be ransomware+trojan? How many Bitcoin do you have to pay to use it?

Oh, and does the older MS Word not have a "Recent Documents" entry? That would simplify the fallback.
You might want to check one of your Excel documents as well, while you're at it. Other document types include PowerPoint.

If this does turn out to be the cause, how did it happen? Did someone use your computer - and your login - in your absence? I have never used a Microsoft login (if that is what it is called), but what would happen if you used yours elsewhere and processed a Word document with Office 365 at that point? Would the file association make it back to your own PC?

Can Office365 be considered to be ransomware+trojan?

Of course. Anything MS can be considered ransomware, including windows itself. I left that bag of garbage a long, long time go and never looked back.

How did it happen?

1. He has automatic update turned on.
2. MS "pushed" one of their frequent update packages to the machine where it was automatically installed.
3. The update package changed the file type association for Word files to Office365 as a "suggestion" for the hapless user to subscribe to the service.
3. The update package repeated the file type associations for all of the other Office products to strengthen the suggestion to subscribe.
4. The Windows team leader for update packages confirmed to his boss that the "suggestion" was made (brownie points for him).
5. The end user either (a) panics, (b) cusses out Microsoft, (c) sighs and fixes the app associations... again, or (d) gives up and buys a MAC.

BTW, remember when Microsoft touted that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows ever released? Guess again. Windows 11 is waiting in the wings.

BTW, remember when Microsoft touted that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows ever released? Guess again. Windows 11 is waiting in the wings.

Well to be pedantic Windows 11 was originally going to be called 10X but the name was changed late in the piece. To be fair the scale of changes between 10 and 11 has not been seen since the change from 3.x to 95. Which was much more significant than the change between 9x and NT5 or XP as it became known.

but yes technically MS fibbed, but considering the porkies they've spouted in the past. Is that really surprising?

To be fair the scale of changes between 10 and 11 has not been seen since the change from 3.x to 95. Which was much more significant than the change between 9x and NT5 or XP as it became known.

Huuh?
3.x to 95 changed the skin, but internal it was far less changed and still (mostly) 16bit. M$ abandoned the 16bit OS after Windows ME. NT started with 3.1 with complete new fully 32 bit internals and a skin looking like Windows 3.x.
Then NT 3.5, 3.51. NT 4 got a new optic, looking like Win95. Windows 2000 and XP were internal still NT, but M$ changed some internals to allow 3rd party drivers direct access to its core and mess-up the system.

HM.

check, Win 95 was predominantly 32 bit. yes I know it wasn't 100%. that didn't happen in the consumer space till XP. going from 3.1 to 95 another big change was embedding DOS or what was left of it inside the 95 shell. previously window sat on top of DOS. 6.22 if I remember right. 95 also introduced 256 character fie names up from 8 previously. the previous 32 to 64 bit migrations at least offered a choice, 11 is pure 64 bit. even though you've not been able to buy a 32 bit CPU for going on a decade and a half by my count. the loss of 'choice' is worrying to some

The point of the post was that 11 has caused a similar schism in the user base.

or (d) gives up and buys a MAC.

Or switches to LibreOffice, on Linux. Using Word on a MAC still leaves you depending on the whims of MS, and you get the whims from Apple added to it for free :D

BTW, remember when Microsoft touted that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows ever released?

Anyone who believed that was an idiot*. Keeping that promise would effectively be MS exiting the OS market.

*Anyone who believes this kind of marketing fluff boasting from any company is an idiot.

3. The update package changed the file type association for Word files to Office365 as a "suggestion" for the hapless user to subscribe to the service.
3. The update package repeated the file type associations for all of the other Office products to strengthen the suggestion to subscribe.

Your answer does not fit the symptoms, specifically that Word97 had been magically uninstalled from the system. As the OP said in a subsequent post below

In my Start Menu there is an Icon for MS Word but there is Nothing else of the program.

Office 365 has been on a software as subscription model since it first came out. How you got a "Lifetime" license I have no idea.

I know last year she was irritated because she had a file she'd created a couple of years ago saved to a USB and tried to use it on the system she was using now at a different place, and it wouldn't load.

The only times I've encountered problems like that is going the other direction. Trying to open a newer file format in an older version that doesn't support it.

The only times I've encountered problems like that is going the other direction. Trying to open a newer file format in an older version that doesn't support it.

When installing Word 2000, you could select which older Word versions to support, e.g. WinWord 2, Word95, Word97, Word(for DOS) 6.0. Same with a MS Word version for Mac (don't remember which version) and some other word processors. Most of these drivers were read only, you couldn't save in those other formats.

HM.

From memory, '07 was the first year of .docx so that's why that is. Another option is Libre Office which is truly free and can read pretty much any format out there including .docx . but both Libre and MS can also use .odt. .odt and .docx are both based on ODF which MS was forced to use after an antitrust suite against it in the early 00's.

I've had a few issues with MS on my daily driver (not this machine which is a VM) uses Office 2021 as I got it very cheap and refuse to 'rent' software.

I also have some of the higher end packages that are not available in 365 such as Viso and Project.

As far as why this happened I'd be betting that your 'My Documents' backs up to Onedrive and that is where the association has been changed

Libre Office is my solution to office files. I just save them in the libre office format and go from there. I don't like paying for software I use infrequently or using Google docs and the data harvesting that is inherent in all Google software.

From memory, '07 was the first year of .docx so that's why that is. Another option is Libre Office which is truly free and can read pretty much any format out there including .docx . but both Libre and MS can also use .odt. .odt and .docx are both based on ODF which MS was forced to use after an antitrust suite against it in the early 00's.

You have bad memory, nothing above is correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

docx was introduced with Office 2003 in 2002, and Office 2000 was patched to be compatible.

LibreOffice .odt was ODF but LibreOffice doesn't respect ODF anymore as it is now ODF 1.3 + extension which are not standardized.

Office .docx was OOXML and not ODF, Word still can save to "Strict OOXM", but it too is not standard compliant anymore.

Microsoft antitrust agreement with the EU was about mediaplayer and Internet Explorer on Windows not any Office product or odt.

odt support was added in Office 2007 to keep some big governmental customer who decided to use odt as a standard format for documents.
http://opendocument.xml.org/news/germany-joins-growing-ranks-of-governments-adopting-odf

I also have my doubts as to whether OneDrive would manipulate permissions in that way, cloud solutions which deliberately damage the data stored on them are unlikely to have much of a future. Microsoft have made some poor decisions over the years - as have we all - but that would really be pushing it.

Actually the problem is usually pushed by major Windows Update which "repair" file association and push additional Microsoft Store apps like the crappy "Office" launcher.
OneDrive indeed so far leave that alone.

get the extension reassigned to the version of Word on your computer

Actually, that often fail when there are multiple Office installation.

A workaround is via the control panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features. There select your Office install then click on change. In the Office Setup choose to do a repair.

Perhaps his friend should point out it's now a good time to install Libre Office.

This. Get rid of Word as fast as you can. You can just wait until MS pulls the next stunt without asking. LibreOffice can do everything MS Word can and some things MS Word can't. And often better. The very few things LO can't do are for a very small select group of users, mostly in the specialized professional fields. It's very unlikely an author will run into them. I don't know about MS Word but for LO there are a number of handy plugins specifically for authors and editors. It's free and runs on almost every Operating System.

I would really like to know how Word can spontaneously uninstall.
One of the possibilities I saw was that he had used his MS Login on another machine and that had modified the file-associations (I've never had one of those logins so I don't know if it works like that) but that would never uninstall Word.
Reinstall Word (if it really has vanished), install LibreOffice - and make it handle MS Office documents, those are the obvious options.

One computer only.

Ok, so it's a laptop which he keeps powered up but not connected to the internet and roughly once a week, he puts on standby and takes it with him to a specific event. While there, it connects and updates. Last week, he left for several days and actually powered it off. When he returned, he turned it on and GLITCH.

And yes, I have mentioned Open Office as well as Libre Office.

In the beginning there was Star Office, and it was not very well known.
Then Sun Microsystems bought the product, made it Open Source and renamed it OpenOffice, and it was good.
Then Sun fell on hard times and were acquired by Oracle, who had no idea what to do with an Open Source project.
At this point LibreOffice was started as a fork of OpenOffice and most of the developers left OO for LO.
OO did ok for a while, but after a while most of the updates were bugfixes and it has gradually faded away. LO is where it is at.

There endeth the history lesson.

You are implying that this situation was brought about by a "dirty shutdown"? I had thought Windows to be more resilient than that - assuming the file system is NTFS and not some FAT-based relic.

You are implying that this situation was brought about by a "dirty shutdown"? I had thought Windows to be more resilient than that - assuming the file system is NTFS and not some FAT-based relic.

Windows is constantly writing to it's own internal system files.

NTFS won't make that much difference. It's less likely now than with older versions, but a hard shutdown (power off without going through the windows shutdown procedure) can still corrupt the system.

Windows is constantly writing to it's own internal system files.

NTFS won't make that much difference. It's less likely now than with older versions, but a hard shutdown (power off without going through the windows shutdown procedure) can still corrupt the system.

??? Starting about 30 years ago I worked for a small engineering company who did automation mainly of textile mills. The build their own machine controllers based on a PC with custom I/O cards and connected to a PLC. We used Windows NT as OS for the Controllers and connected the machines to a small network with some PC-workstations with WinNT. We started with NT 3.51 and then switched to NT 4.0.
All these NT systems were never properly shutdown, just powered off. With more than 300 installations we had never a corrupted system!
Which older version do you mean? Those old crappy 16 bit systems Windows 3.1, Win95, Win98 and Millennium?

HM.

Which older version do you mean? Those old crappy 16 bit systems Windows 3.1, Win95, Win98 and Millennium?

It's very rare, but I've seen it happen with a Win7 system.

Not badly enough to cause the system to fail to boot, but enough to cause run time problems until the system files were repaired.

With more than 300 installations we had never a corrupted system!

Ways to corrupt NTFS:
* Defective Hardware.
* Enable Write Cache with NCQ Drive and Crash (*).
* Use a buggy Linux driver to modify an NTFS drive.
* Crash (power-off) while NTFS is processing it's transaction logs from a previous Crash.
* Twice Microsoft pushed a buggy Update which corrupted NTFS stored on Storage Spaces.

(*) On Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista disk Write Caching was disabled. Corruption was non existent. With Windows 7, 10, 11 Write caching is enable, minor corruption on crash are in fact relatively common. Chkdsk is run on start when that occurs with usually very good results.

The marvels of MS silent updates.

I would really like to know how Word can spontaneously uninstall.

If windows detected as an incomplete power up, on restart, it will attempt a "repair" if after the repair, it still can't complete a power up, it will propose a reset. This will do a "fresh" install which of course will remove all programs (except those from the App Store) but it will keep the user data intact.

If I were in your position, I would copy several of your longer documents onto a thumb drive, and take it to someone who runs Libre Office (either on Windows or on Linux) and see if they are able to read them.

I feel sure that will work. If so, then just download the free Libre Office for Windows, and move on. Don't reward MS by paying them another fee.

Exactly this, very good advise. I'm sure LibreOffice can open all Word documents unless MS has done something to them to make them proprietary to Office365, which I very much doubt. Don't pay the ransom for something better you can get for free.

You can install LibreOffice even if MSOffice is installed and try to open a copy of one of your documents. It should just work. You can configure LibreOffice to use the MS .docx format by default but I would recommend to switch to the open document format .odt. Less chance that MS takes over your document again with the next update.

Exactly this, very good advise. I'm sure LibreOffice can open all Word documents unless MS has done something to them to make them proprietary to Office365

I work in IT, for a consulting firm embedded with a large client that has both Office 2016 and Office 365. There is no problem passing documents back and forth between the two versions.

I also know from direct personal experience that LO will open docx files from Office 2016.

If you have some form of MS Office installed, render unto Caesar and all that (leave .doc and .docx to them).
If you don't, LibreOffice asks you if it should hold itself responsible for these document types, and it also warns you not to say "yes" if you are just evaluating.
MS will *not* take over responsibility for .doc or .docx on a Windows update, at least it has not done that to me in over 20 years. It may do so on a MS Office update, don't know because I last installed Word or Excel over 20 years ago.

An additional problem here is that Paladin_HGWT apparently has updates to his spell-checker dictionary. I have no idea how to handle that problem.

Open %appdata%\Microsoft\Office16.0\###\Proofing\RoamingCustom.dic file with notepad++ It's a text file encoded UTF16-LE BOM change the encoding to UTF-8, add the header from %appdata%\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook\standard.dic something like:

OOoUserDict1
lang: "U+003C"none"U+003E" ***
type: positive
---

*** can't type tag in the forums...

and save it there:

%appdata%\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook\standard.dic

That's all

Note that Grammarly can't work offline.

That's all

I haven't touched anything Windows/Office in 15 years so using a MS dictionary is out of the question. Editing a file to change the BOM (Byte Order Mark) is something I'm very familiar with but I doubt many here will even know what a BOM is other than a thing that goes BOOM! :)

We can assume that the documents were not converted to Office 365, what changed was the file association. With your copy of Word having vanished, Windows was telling you these were Office 365 documents and you did not have that product.

There are some differences, and I developed "muscle memory" with MS Word.

You can make LibreOffice look-and-feel exactly like MS Office. I never did it but if you search for it you'll probably find several how-to's.

ETA: I did a quick search for "make libreoffice look like MSword" and was surprised how far they have gone. Even that horrible ribbon, MS icons, and MS fonts can be set. You'll hardly notice you're working with LibreOffice instead of Word :)