Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

I would strongly discourage adding anything like this to your normal.dot
template. Certainly don't do so unless you 100% trust the person who sent
you the macro - in this case John Richards. This macro could contain a virus
or "Trojan horse" program, which could then infect all of your document
files or trash your system in many other ways. A good virus checker should
spot it, but not necessarily. Can we trust John not only to be a man of
integrity himself but also that his own system is virus-free?

Let me offer some advice:

1) Always use an up-to-date virus checker on anything other than text-only
e-mails that you receive from this and any other public list. I have checked
this with Norton AntiVirus, but my own virus definitions are out of date and
certainly would not catch a virus or Trojan which John had just written.
(And why should you trust me any more than John to say that this is
virus-free?)

2) In this case, don't add the otabhs macro to your normal template - unless
you are really going to use it time and time again. Instead, copy the file
otabhs.dot to your Office macros folder (in my system,
C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates) and then attach this macro
individually to each document on which you wish to use it. The process is as
John describes below, except that you should leave unchecked any box which
says something like "Add to Normal template". Even to do this is somewhat
dangerous, as John could easily have sent a macro which wipes your hard
disk. (I have looked at the macro code and it doesn't appear to do this, but

do you trust me?)

In fact I could say that otabhs.dot is a Trojan in the sense that it has
undisclosed functions. For this template file contains a large number of
other macros, buttons etc which are not required for the otabhs conversion.
If you follow John's instructions below, these will all be added to your
normal template whether you want them or not. (You could select to add just
the one macro, but the instructions below seem to do more than that.) I
assume that they are not harmful (as I think I can trust John) but their
behaviour is unpredictable and undocumented. I don't think John should be
distributing this whole package without warning. He could very easily have
created a template containing only the one macro otabhs as documented.

Peter Kirk

-----Original Message-----
From: John Richards [mailto:jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk]
Sent: 22 November 2000 14:29
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: OTA BHS conversion to Word 2000


From: "John Richards" <jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk>

> You may need to copy this macro to your Normal.dot
> template,

My apologies. Of course there is no need to copy the macro into the
Normal.dot - all that is necessary is to copy the template file into the MS
Office Templates folder and then in Word 2000 go to the menu
Tools/Templates, and Add the otabhs template, making sure it is selected
(ie. that the little square box beside it in the Templates and Add-ins
dialog box has a little cross in it). The macro will then be available in
the Normal template.

John Richards






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