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• Virus files
  I suspect that this is one of the most important reasons for not accepting Word documents. No matter how careful you are, no matter how careful your correspondents, you cannot be sure that you will not fall vistim to a macro virus or worse. Yet you are not downloading a program, which you might expect to contain executable code, but a document, which ought to contain nothing but information. Unfortunately, this is not the case: Word documents contain lots more than just information.
• Large files
  Word files are enormous by comparison with other files containing the same amount of data. I have just created a Word document containing nothing more than a limerick. This file runs to 19,456 bytes! The same file as a rich text format file is 2,225 bytes and a plain text file containing the same text is only 195 characters. I accept that formatting information is lost in the text file, but a hundred times bigger is surely too high a price to pay. Rich text formats might be an acceptable compomise as not everyone wants to read unformatted text.
• Insecure files
  If you are not careful, you could be sending your secrets. By default, Word documents contain a full history of what they contained each time they were saved. If you save the same document many times, you may be giving your recipient the opportunity to see what you said to others recently. This may include confidential information you may not wish them to see. Sometimes, for example, you might be sending the same request for information to competitors or be presenting the same facts with a slightly (or significantly) different emphasis. You probably don't want your recipients to know this.
• Proprietary files
  This will come as an enormous shock to many people: not everybody uses Microsoft products. By various means which are debated elsewhere, Microsoft have reached a dominant position in many markets, but this does not mean that everybody uses their products. Some people have ideological reasons for choosing not to use Microsoft products; others don't use them because their systems do not support them. if you send documents to people who cannot read them, you might as well be sending documents in a language they don't speak. If your information is important enough for you to want people to read it, you probably want them to be able to read it. How much of this document would you have attempted to read if it had been written in Portuguese? Even if you thought it was important, how much effort would you go to for a document in Portuguese.

1. Open (or create) your document file
2. Choose File/Save As
3. Choose Save As type Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
4. Check that the file name now ends with .rtf
5. Click on the Save button

Unfortunately, there are people who go into something like PANIC! when asked to do something difficult, like for example, saving a file in something other than Word Document format. With assistance, I recently managed to calm someone down enough to listen and be shown how to save files as .RTF and by the time I arrived home, I had a copy of a rich text file from this person in my inbox. The following day, however, this same person forwarded me a .DOC from a third party.

While it's true that all recent versions of MS Office supposedly require the user's permission to run a macro, a wee little oversight at Redmond Security Central makes it possible for an RTF (Rich Text Format) document opened by Word to execute a macro automatically if it's embedded in a template.

"When Word is used to open a document that’s based on a template, both the document and the template should be checked for macros. This vulnerability involves a case in which this isn’t done correctly," an MS security bulletin explains, doing its damnedest not to say 'we goofed'.

Macros run on a machine or network at the user's level of permission, so of course a malicious one can perform quite a lot of mischief.

In this case, developing an exploit would be child's play. The required template could be fetched from a remote location, such as a Web site to which the feature-rich Word can connect automatically. This would be the preferred MO for someone trying to propagate via e-mail a macro virus exploiting the RTF vulnerability.

RTF is something of the lingua franca of word processing, readable by just about every application ever designed, so it's still in common use wherever people have to collaborate whilst using different software.

Affected programs include Word 97; Word 98 (J); Word 2000; Word 98 (Mac); and Word 2001 (Mac), but not Word 2002.

"Previous versions [of Word] are no longer supported and may or may not be affected by this vulnerability," MS says. It's reasonable to assume that they are affected, so there we have one more little motive to upgrade. ®

Just in case you trust this site in case to want to update your copies of MS-Word, the files to do it are

• Word 2K patch
• Word 97 patch