Office Begone!

August 2, 2004 2:19 PM

How do I wipe every trace of Office from my OS X based Mac? [mi]

Somehow, my copy of Office has become riddled with Macro viruses - every time I open a document, I'm asked if I've wished Shankar a happy birthday. I've followed a number of online tutorials to rid myself of this problem, but it keeps coming back.

But today, my workplace provided me with a new copy of Office 2004. So, what I'd like to do is purge the system of everything related to Office X, and then install the latest version. Advice?

posted by aladfar to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Get Virex- remove the Macro virii. It should do that. In fact, if you buy a .mac account you get that for free

You might be able to scan for free here:
http://www.nai.com/us/downloads/beta/virex/

That's a beta. Try it, fix your machine.

Those Word Virii are in the stylesheets as macros. You could just (across the board) turn off macros.

Just some thoughts.
posted by filmgeek at 2:32 PM on August 2, 2004

That's the thing - I got one of these macro virus deals a while back, ran virex and turned off macros. Now I've ended up with a new and different Word virus.

Is there a specific place where Word stores these files? Virex can take a long time if I have it scan *everything*.
posted by aladfar at 4:33 PM on August 2, 2004

I think just trashing:

Root/Applications/Microsfot Office X/Templates whould do it for you, but just in case, you might also want to trash:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft

root/Library/Preferences/Microsoft (if it exists)

Root/Applications/Microsoft Office X

There may be other places this stuff could hide, but that's where I'd start.
posted by willnot at 4:54 PM on August 2, 2004

Office may have deposited files in ~/Documents, and there will be a passel of Office-related files in ~/Library/Preferences (outside /Microsoft).

I've taken to saving all incoming files, and my own work, as RTFs. Not only does this protect me and everyone else against macro viruses (I think), it's a fixed, published format, and should be relatively future-proof. It would be a PITA to do this to all old files, but it's what I've been doing going forward for about a year.
posted by adamrice at 6:31 PM on August 2, 2004

In a striking change, Office 2004 has an optional installer that offers to uninstall previous versions. I have not yet tested for thoroughness, but if you haven't tried it yet, that might be helpful.
posted by britain at 7:28 PM on August 2, 2004

Thanks britain - after running Virex, which seemed to solve my problem with Office X, I installed Office 2004 and saw the uninstaller feature. It appears to have worked as advertised.

So all is well on my machine. Thanks all!
posted by aladfar at 8:04 PM on August 2, 2004