The BugBlog

Service Pack Fixes Outlook Mail Merge Problems

Do a marketing campaign mail merge in Microsoft Outlook 2007 service pack, and the title and suffix fields may not get merged. Microsoft has fixed this with the Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

Firewall May Block Apple TV

When you connect Apple TV to a Mac, a firewall running on the Mac may interfere with the connection. Luckily, the error message gives you a good idea of the problem: "The Apple TV [Name] is not responding. Check that any firewall software running on this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689." Apple shows you how to do this here.

Critical PowerPoint Bug Fixed

Microsoft released a critical update for all versions of PowerPoint to fix a bug that may allow attackers to run hostile code via a poisoned PPT file. This bug is already being exploited, so if you use PowerPoint on Windows (no Mac OS X patch yet - nor is there one needed) go here for the patch

MobileMe Won't Move a .mov

Apple says that sometimes you won't be able to move a .mov file in a Gallery using MobileMe. If this happens, you may need to use iPhoto to sync your photos first. Apple shows you how to do this.

Microsoft Fixes an Access 2007 Import Bug

When using the Excel ISAM driver to import a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into Access 2007, you may run into problems if the spreadsheet has a chart. Instead of importing, you may get the error message: "The wizard is unable to access information in the file <file name>. Please check that the file exists and is in the correct format." Microsoft has a hotfix for this.

Vista Printing Confusion

In Windows Vista, if you go to Windows Explorer and select a number of different files and then click Print. All the files will be printed out in the format of the last file you selected. That's no big deal if they are all MS Word docs, but it may be a big deal if they all different file types. Microsoft has a hot fix for this - get it here.

Patch Tuesday Coming For PowerPoint

This Tuesday is Patch Tuesday for Microsoft, and they will be releasing a critical update for PowerPoint. This appears to be for Office 2000 through Office 2007. It will fix a bug that lets attackers rig a PowerPoint file to run hostile content. You can read the vague preview notice for a hint of the details to come.

Google Chrome is Tarnished

According to ZD Net's Zero Day security blog, Google is silently patching their Chrome browser due to a critical security bug. The problem is in how Chrome validates some input, which could allow an attacker to crash the browser and run hostile code. According to Zero Day, the browser will patch itself without informing the user. Read more here.

Backing Up iGoogle

It's important to back up your data - but what about stuff up in "the cloud", as in cloud computing. In particular, if you've spent lots of time customizing your iGoogle page, are all your settings safe? According to Google, they make back-ups of your settings on their servers. However, you can also make your own back-ups and save them on your own computer. This Google Help page shows you how.

Fixing Up Outlook 2007

Microsoft says that Outlook 2007 Service Pack (SP) 2 introduces a large number of stability and performance fixes that they say will make Outlook 2007 work much better. See their explanation of the fixes.