Anonymous Track Changes

Word tracks the name of a person making changes, when Track Changes is turned on. There may be times when you don’t want the name of the person(s) making changes in a document to appear. What can be done to keep this information “anonymous”?

Two ideas …

Quick Excel Tips

A few Excel tips on a hot summer afternoon …

• Press Alt + Enter to force a new line in a cell.

• To quickly select all the cells in a spreadsheet, click the “cell” above the Row 1 cell, to the left of the Col A cell [see the fat plus sign in the screen cap below?]
  
  Or, use Ctrl + A , the universal Windows keyboard shortcut for Select All.

• Quickly set column widths as wide as they need to be – place the mouse pointer between the column headings [see screen cap below] – and double-click.
  
  Select contiguous multiple columns by pressing and dragging the mouse across column headings – watch the pointer – it should take on the appearance of a downward pointing arrow.
  
  Select non-contiguous columns by holding down Ctrl key while using the mouse to select various columns.  Once the above selections have been made, you can set column widths as mentioned in the 1st part of this tip.

Spyware Weekly is back!

My favorite newsletter, Spyware Weekly, is back.  Yayy!

Read or subscribe to Spyware Weekly at SpywareInfo.  SpywareInfo are hijackware and spyware removal specialists.  I’ve found the information shared on this site to be reliably top notch and timely.  There’s lots of background information for those who want to learn, and only excellent products are recommended.  Mike Healan’s opinions, rants and raves about privacy, security, and the state of computing are thought provoking, as well.

Welcome back Mike!

Symantec Anti-Virus Flaw Patched

CNET news.com reported on May 30 that researchers at eEye Digital Security discovered a vulnerability in Symantec's Client Security 3.1 and AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.1 software; the Norton line of consumer antivirus products remained unaffected. From eEye's website: "Description: A remotely exploitable vulnerability exists within the Symantec Antivirus program. This flaw does not require any end user interaction for exploitation and can compromise affected systems, allowing for the execution of malicious code with SYSTEM level access."

On May 31 CIO Today reported that the vulnerability had been patched.

Symantec has released Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) signatures via LiveUpdate for Symantec Client Security, to provide protection against the vulnerability.

Redacting PDFs

I received a phone call today from a client who is concerned about redaction in PDFs. He wanted to know what tools were available to reliably redact PDFs, and if there were certain processes he and his staff should be aware of. I pointed him to:

• Planet PDF – PDF security: Redaction and third party tools
• Adobe Acrobat – Redaction of Confidential Information in a Document
• PDF for Lawyers – PDF Redaction — some Q&A
• NSA – Redacting With Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted from Word to PDF

Fundamentally, don’t think that just because you can’t see digital information, it isn’t there. It will be discovered and used by someone else.

 

A Tale of Spike, Corruption, and Change …

A client recently had problems with a Word 2003 document containing tracked changes. The problems were such that I suspected general corruption of the document. One remedy in this situation is to copy everything except the last paragraph mark – which is where the corruption may reside – and paste into a new, blank document.

But – remember – the document contained tracked changes. A simple copy/paste will not preserve the tracking. What to do? SPIKE! Spike, you ask? What the heck is spike?

Select All Except the Last Para Mark

Quick method for selecting everything except the last paragraph mark in a Word document for those of you handy with a keyboard … [Why would you want to do this?]