OFF98: Extraneous Data May Be Saved with Office Documents

When you save a file in any Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition program, extraneous data that exists on your hard disk drive may be included in the file.

The Microsoft Office 98 Updater addresses a security issue in Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition. This problem is caused by the way space on the hard disk is allocated for file storage by Office 98. The file system of Mac OS, like the file systems of many other operating systems, does not delete a file when you use the Delete command. It removes the reference to the file and marks the space it occupied as "free." Office 98 does not initialize the hard disk space that Mac OS allocates for a Save command; therefore, a small amount of unused space on the hard disk may contain random data from previously deleted files. While the data cannot be viewed when opened as a native Office file, it can be viewed using an ASCII text editor.

To resolve this problem, download and install the Microsoft Office 98 Updater.

To obtain the Microsoft Office 98 Updater, see the Microsoft World Wide Web site: For additional information about installing the Microsoft Office 98 Updater, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For additional information about removing extraneous data from existing documents, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition.