Message: Macros have been disabled. How to fix?

[Sesquipedalian Sam]

About a week ago, I noticed that Word started issuing a "Security
Warning" message in the message bar. It says "Macros have been
disabled".

I was swamped with work and didn't have time deal with it until today.
After the message, is a box labelled "Options". Clicking on that box
bring up a message box saying that macros have been disabled because
"The digital signature has expired". It then has some information
about the program whose signature has expired. It's a case management
program that we have been using for many years, but have not upgraded
to the last two upgrades.

At the bottom of the box, I am offered two options:

1. Help protect me from unknown content (recommended).
2. Enable this content.

I selected #2 and the warning message disappeared...until I opened
another document or reopened this one after saving and closing.

We are not going to upgrade this program, so I need another option.

Another option in the message box was to open the Trust Center.
Clicking on that, I see one of my options is "Trusted Publishers".
Clicking on that, I see just one entry. It's this program and it says
the expiration date was 7/24/09. I tried opening that entry, but there
does not appear to be any way to override this. Very helpful,
Microsoft.

I noticed the next option is "Trusted Locations". The error message
gave me the path to the offending file (a .dot file), so I click on
"Add new location" and add that path.

When I close out of everything, the warning message seems to have gone
away -- at least for now.

Did I just open up my machine to all kinds of malware?

Is there a better way to solve this problem?

 

[Graham Mayor]

This must be Word 2007. Unless a digital signature is valid, macros in files
stored in a location other than a trusted location will display such a
warning. Word 2007 allows you to trust more than the standard template
locations as you have discovered. You are not open to any more problems than
you were before, unless you add documents with auto-running macros to the
folder you have just marked as trusted and open those documents - and even
then only if those documents contain malicious code, which of course you
would have already established before opening them, if they were not your
own documents.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Sesquipedalian Sam]

This must be Word 2007. Unless a digital signature is valid, macros in files
stored in a location other than a trusted location will display such a
warning. Word 2007 allows you to trust more than the standard template
locations as you have discovered. You are not open to any more problems than
you were before, unless you add documents with auto-running macros to the
folder you have just marked as trusted and open those documents - and even
then only if those documents contain malicious code, which of course you
would have already established before opening them, if they were not your
own documents.

Okey-dokey. Thanks.