Domenic said:
At times, during the course of trying to help others, through newsgroups
and other forums, I'm asked to look at an Excel attachment.
Is it safe to open these attachments, or for that matter any Excel file
that may be sent to me, as long as I "Disable Macros" when opening them?
As a policy, I don't.
It's partly because of viruses. While Disable Macros will disable VBA
macros, but may not be able to disable XL4M macros (but will give you
the option to not open the file), I'm not interested in taking the time
to download a potential danger to my machine.
Another reason I don't is that, almost invariably, those who post an
unsolicited workbooks expect both the purpose and the problem to be
self-evident. This is almost never the case (not blaming the poster,
necessarily - all *my* workbooks are completely self-evident to me!).
Nothing substitutes for a thorough description of both the aim and the
problem(s).
Attachments also take up bandwidth - there are a large number of
newsgroup posters still using dial-up, attachments take up their time
and money to download. Perhaps more importantly, attachments take up
storage space on thousands of news servers throughout the world. A
single attachment takes up the storage space of tens to hundreds of
messages. Servers often support a fixed storage amount for a newsgroup,
cycling older messages off as new messages come in. So attachments
reduce the value of the newsgroups by reducing the number of messages
available to browse.
For those reasons, at least, I usually filter out messages that have
attachments so that I never see them.
