excellence

Binary? Decimal? Excel 2007 finds it all so confusing

Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed a bug in Excel 2007 that can cause it to produce erroneous answers for a particular multiplication task.

Specifically, the problem can crop up when the answer to a multiplication problem should result in 65,535. You fans of binary arithmetic don't need to be told that's 2 to the 16th power minus one, or maximum integer that can be described with two bytes, counting up from zero. So it's a good bet some binary-to-decimal translation is involved in the problem.

A repair is in the works, Microsoft said, without sharing much more … Read more

Microsoft announces six patches coming in July

As part of its July 2007 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft will patch at least six vulnerabilities. Three of the patches are deemed "critical" by Microsoft and affect software for Excel, Windows, and .Net Framework. Two are deemed "important" and affect software for Publisher and Windows XP. One is deemed "moderate" and affects Windows Vista. Details will be released on Tuesday, July 10, 2007.

Under the Radar: Battle of the collaboration tools, tryptophan

Presenters for the post-lunch session today focused on two challenges. First was how to help people simultaneously collaborate on projects. Equally important was how to keep a room full of sleepy bloggers, analysts, and venture capitalists awake and alert after a lunch of turkey sandwiches. Luckily, we've played with all four of these applications before, and so we stuck with the roast beef.

Editgrid kicked off the round of presentations. Instead of PowerPoint, they used a tabbed spreadsheet in Editgrid to present. One of the really great features of Editgrid, which we've discussed before, is the option to … Read more

Microsoft brings Excel online with SharePoint

Microsoft offers a Web version of Excel. But there's an important difference from competitors like Google and Zoho: It's tied to SharePoint Server and Office 2007.

A Microsoft employee, Tod Hilton, set off a post at TechCrunch when he wrote a blog talking about his plans to start working on the Excel Services team.

Hilton wrote that a future product would compete with online spreadsheets like DabbleDB, Zoho, and Google Spreadsheets. He later removed those comparisons from his blog post.

In the course of posting and deleting, Hilton shined light on a product that few people in the … Read more

The best of both worlds: Xcellery makes Excel collaborative

As I said in a recent post, Webware relies on Google Spreadsheets as our groupware application for tracking which Web services we want to write about. But because it is sorely lacking in the features department, I always have my eye out for alternatives offering more Excel-ish features as well as the killer collaboration function that makes Google's Spreadsheets so useful.

One new alternative: Xcellery, a service that turns ordinary Excel spreadsheets into shareable documents. With Xcellery, multiple people can have the same spreadsheet open at the same time. Everybody's changes get recorded and shared since the system … Read more

Track your online foes with Competitious

Launched last October, Competitious lets you quickly and easily compare your Web site with your competitors' sites. After adding their URLs, you can compare traffic, make detailed comparison charts, and keep track of press (both good and bad). The goal is to get a quick snapshot of your competition and have the tools to keep tabs on them in hopes of making your own site better.

There's a strong emphasis on collaboration, as you can invite others to join your Competitious project. Each of your collaborators can use the Competitious bookmarklet to add stories to each competitor's profiles. … Read more

Buffer overflow in Microsoft Hyperlink Object Library

There's a buffer overflow within the Microsoft Hyperlink Object Library (hlink.dll) that allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service attack and then possibly execute arbitrary code on the compromised PC. This is done via a long hyperlink, as demonstrated when using an Excel worksheet with a long HTML link in Unicode.

Although this sounds similar, this vulnerability is a different from the Unspecified vulnerability in Microsoft Excel, or CVE-2006-3059. This flaw was patched in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-050.

Additional Resources:

Vendor Patch Information: MS06-050 NIST CVE #: CVE-2006-3086 US-CERT Vulnerability #: VU39444 Secunia advisory #: 20748

Internet Explorer DirectX Image Transform Object Denial of Service Vulnerability

This vulnerability creates a denial of service (crash) within Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 after a victim has been tricked into visiting a malicious Web page. Using the DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient ActiveX object with a long (1) StartColorStr or (2) EndColorStr property, an error is generated.

Additional Resources:

French Security Incident Response Team: ADV-2006-2832 BrowserFun: #17 National Institute of Standards and Technology: CVE-2006-3657