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Microsoft OffVis, Office Visualization Tool

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:54:07 +0000

OffVis, the Microsoft Office Visualization Tool, has been designed to visualize the binary file formats doc, xls or ppt. While it has been primarily created for IT professionals and security researchers, it can have its uses for less tech savvy or security interested Office users.

The software requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0, but has no other dependencies besides that. Users can launch by clicking on OffVis.exe after unpacking the download to a local directory.

First step in the analysis of Office documents is to load a supported file format from the File menu.

OffVis displays the raw file contents on the left side. A parser can now be selected from the parser pull down menu to parse the document that has been loaded.

microsoft offvis office visualization tool

If you’d like to parse only at the OLESS layer, choose “Format Library.DLL: OLESSFormat”. If you’d like to attempt to parse the file as an Excel, PowerPoint, or Word file, select one of those parsers.

Parsing results are displayed on the right side, selecting an element will highlight it on the raw file contents side.

The interesting aspect of the software for all users is that it can detect malicious code. It will automatically display “definitely malicious” entries in the document, if any are found.

Office users can therefor use the Office Visualization Tool to analyze binary Office formats for malicious code before executing them on their system.

The program only detects known vulnerabilities that have been patched already. The following vulnerabilities are detected:

CVE-2006-0009, PowerPoint, MS06-012 (March 2006)
CVE-2006-0022, PowerPoint, MS06-028 (June 2006)
CVE-2006-2492, Word, MS06-027 (June 2006)
CVE-2006-3434, PowerPoint, MS06-062 (October 2006)
CVE-2006-3590, PowerPoint, MS06-048 (August 2006)
CVE-2006-4534, Word, MS06-060 (October 2006)
CVE-2006-4694, PowerPoint, MS06-058 (October 2006)
CVE-2006-5994, Word, MS07-014 (February 2007)
CVE-2006-6456, Word, MS07-014 (February 2007)
CVE-2007-0515, Word, MS07-014 (February 2007)
CVE-2007-0671, Excel, MS07-015 (February 2007)
CVE-2007-0870, Word, MS07-024 (May 2007)
CVE-2008-0081, Excel, MS08-014 (March 2008)
CVE-2008-4841, Word, MS09-010 (April 2009)
CVE-2009-0238, Excel, MS09-009 (April 2009)
CVE-2009-0556,PowerPoint, MS09-017 (May 2009)

It may even make sense to run the tool, even if all the security patches have been applied to the Office software. Why? Because it can provide valuable information about a sender or the origin of the document. The OffVis software is available via direct download from Microsoft.

Office Tabs Brings Tabs To Microsoft Office

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:12:29 +0000

Working with multiple open documents in Microsoft Office applications like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel is not as comfortable as it can be. The documents are all placed in the same interface with no straightforward way to switch between documents easily (the keyboard shortcut Alt Number will do the trick but one has to know the number of documents to use it effectively and it is limited to a maximum of nice documents).

Office Tabs brings a possible solution in forms of a tabbed browsing interface for Microsoft Office. The software program supports Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint and will display a toolbar beneath the ribbon interface in Office 2007 that is displaying all open documents. A double-click will quickly open a new document and a click on existing tabs will display that document in the foreground.

The tabbed interfaces for the three Microsoft Office products can be configured individually. This includes disabling the tabbed interface in an Office module, configuring the layout (colors, appearance and position) and shortcuts.

Custom Tabs is compatible with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2008 on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. It can be downloaded from the Chinese homepage of the developer.

Microsoft Office Classic Menu Add-on

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:02:18 +0000

If you cannot get used to the ribbon interface of Microsoft Office 2007 because it does not display all the options needed to do the job in one place you might like the Microsoft Office add-on Ubit Menu (via Instant Fundas) which brings back the classic Office menu to Office 2007. The software developers released an international version of the Microsoft Office add-on just recently which added German, English, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese support which means it can be used with those Microsoft Office versions.

The installation of the Microsoft Office add-on is straightforward. It can be downloaded as an executable from the developers homepage. The setup will install the classic Office menu in the three Office programs Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. The changes are visible immediately after installation and first start of one of the supported Microsoft Office programs.

The Microsoft Office add-on can be uninstalled from the software uninstallation menu of the Windows operating system. The add-on will bring the classic Office menu known from Microsoft Office 2003 to the supported programs of Office 2007. Below is a screenshot of how Office 2007 looks like after installation of the add-on.

It should be noted that the Microsoft Office add-on Ubit Menu will leave the current Office ribbon interface as it is. It does add a new entry to that menu on the other hand called menu which combines all the menu entries known from Office 2003.