Word Output Security Notice

[melfring]

We have a fairly large project (300 topics) that we output to Word format. Suddenly we are getting a Microsoft Office Has Identified a Potential Security Concern message for each topic that is output. You have to click Yes to get past the message and needless to say, clicking Yes 300 times is not really efficient! Has anyone seen this issue? Microsoft identifies this as an old 2010 issue so it should not be surfacing now. We have recently taken the new Flare 2021 r3 and am wondering if we triggered something when we did.
Any ideas are most welcome.

[melfring]

Starting to feel more like a perfect storm of a 365 and Flare update at or about the same time. MS365 is looking like the culprit but since the error is being caused by an embedded image file, if anyone has any thoughts, they'd be very welcome.

[bobmoon]

I've been getting this as well on v2021 r3. It's especially annoying because it pops in the background and I don't notice that the build is waiting on confirmation.

The issue seems to be that Flare is generating Word docs in a "non-trusted" folder. I added my Flare project structure as a Trusted Location, and Flare now generates a document without the prompt.

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Trusted Locations > Add new location. I selected Subfolders of this location are also trusted.

Making this folder "trusted" means Word won't scan it for virus activity. There is nominal risk of course, so be aware of that.

If you opened a virus-infected Word doc in this location, Word would not catch it. I guess if someone hacked Flare to generate infected docs, it would be a (very roundabout) way to infect Flare user computers.

Hope that helps,
Bob

[melfring]

Thanks, Bob.
We have tried the Trusted Center route but it doesn't fix the problem. Even with Flare identified as a trusted source, the security warning still displays. If we were only creating one Word file, it wouldn't be a problem. But since we are creating 300 individual documents, it is a show stopper.
Folks in the Word forum have indicated that this error is becoming more prominent, particularly for 365 users, but MS has [so far] not indicated any plan to adjust the setting/error.

[WebHelpppp]

Thanks, Bob, that solution worked for me.

Word > File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Trusted Locations > Add new location

[Nick A]

I get a warning that Word has blocked potentially unsafe macros, which is ridiculous as Enable all macros is set in Trust Center and Flare does not add macros to its Word output. However, my solution was simple and may also solve similar problems. In Flare, go to File > Options > Build and clear View output after successful build. If Flare does not attempt to trigger Word after the build, it simply writes the file to disk. When you manually open the files in Word, there are no spurious warnings as the files are, of course, perfectly safe.

I have also had meaningless errors when starting multiple simultaneous .docx output builds in Flare, where the jobs seem to trip over each other and fail with a build error. In Flare, go to File > Options > Build and set Maximum Concurrent Builds to 1; leave View output after successful build enabled if you want to watch the progress. You can then start multiple build jobs in Flare, except now it will queue them properly and build them sequentially without issue.