What is an Active X?

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ActiveX is a programming interface modification that lets you spend lots of
time fiddling with details - unless you know how to use it, in which case it
can be helpful.

You need to learn computer programming to use it well, though. Basic
suggestion - don't use ActiveX until you need to. Don't use it until you
learn to program.

Why are you asking?

Version of Word?
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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What is an Active X?
Click to expand...

It's a stupid name dreamed up by some marketing hack for a technology
(formerly called OLE) that Microsoft probably now wishes it had never
invented.

The Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activex gives
the geek version. In a nutshell, it's a method for making one program
appear to run inside another program -- for example, you can have a
piece of an Excel spreadsheet inside a Word document, or have a
QuickTime movie play inside an Internet Explorer window. All of the
items created by the Insert > Object menu item use ActiveX, as do the
objects on the Control Toolbox.

The trouble is that security (or, more precisely, lack of security)
was never considered when ActiveX was developed. The criminals and
sociopaths known as "hackers" realized that ActiveX objects make life
very easy for them -- you open some innocuous Word document containing
an ActiveX link, and suddenly they have complete control of your
computer.

So far, the tools Microsoft has given for dealing with this problem in
Word are almost worse than the problem itself. The recommendation is
that you set your macro security level to High and trust only macros
and objects that are digitally signed with a security certificate.
Unfortunately, most of the objects that are available aren't signed,
and security certificates for signing your own work are expensive. You
can set the security level to Medium and Word will prompt you whether
to enable the macros and objects in a document as you open it -- but
that presumes you know whether they really can be trusted.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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