J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Attention Excel 2003 Users

This might affect a few people: Microsoft to drop support for Office 2003 SP2.

Microsoft Corp. warned users yesterday that it will drop support for Office 2003 Service Pack 2 in three weeks, and it urged them to upgrade to a newer service pack that was involved in a dust-up earlier this year over blocked file formats.

The company's policy is to support an Office service pack for 12 months after it releases a successor. Microsoft rolled out Office 2003 SP3 in September 2007. It always extends that 12-month period to the following month's second Tuesday, the day it usually issues security updates.

The obvious solution is to apply SP3. But...

Office 2003 SP3 instituted new security policies that automatically blocked a number of older file types; most of them were Microsoft-designed formats, although some third-party formats were included in the ban. Microsoft defended the move last January, when it said that "some older file formats are insecure" and that "the decision to block the formats is strictly to protect your machine from being compromised."

According to this Microsoft Support article, the blocked file types are: Corel Draw (.cdr), Lotus and Quattro (.wk1, .wk4, .wj3, wk1 FMT, .wks, .wk3, wk3 FM3, .wj2, .wq1, .fm3, .wj1), Excel 4.0 Charts (.xlc), and dBase II (.dbf) files.

But if you really need to work with these file types, Microsoft has a download that can automatically re-enable these file types.