Comments on: A Smarter Open Recent Files Function in Office

By: dean

dean — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 18:29:39 +0000

You’ve probably seen this and updated already, but in the unlikely case that hasn’t happened: there have been two announcements about security flaws that leverage the ODT format — they can access a Python library on your machine (applies to Open Office and Libre Office). Basically a library in the office system itself will take outside commands and execute them. Reports and proof of concept code + video were sent to the relevant organizations.

Libre Office seems to have a patch for the issue available, but it isn’t clear that Open Office does. I don’t know if updates are pushed automatically to end-users or whether you have to request them.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 21:06:29 +0000

In reply to Paul Hutchinson. Linux KDE desktop does this as well, and it is divided by type correctly. Gnome probably does it as well, not sure.

By: Paul Hutchinson

Paul Hutchinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 20:52:44 +0000

I suspect another reason the LO devs aren’t in a hurry to change this function is because the majority of users are on Windows, and Windows fixes this itself via the “jump list” feature. On my Windows boxes all the jump lists are application specific so right clicking Draw shows me only the recent drawings, Calc only shows spreadsheets, etc. On top of this there is a pinning function for jump lists so I pin documents that I know I’ll revisit every month or two so they don’t scroll off the list ever.

As soon as I move to one of my *nix boxes I curse the fact that LO mixes the doc types together and less than 50% of the time the doc I want is in the list.