How to Configure Macro Settings in MS Word

MS Word macros can ruin your day if you’re not careful enough. A macro is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many occasions when you need to record a macro and distribute MS Word documents that have a macro embedded in them.
However, a “black hat” programmer can insert a macro into a MS Word document that can devastate your system if you open that Word file without any precautions.
Thus it’s important that your MS Word settings alert you to the existence of an embedded macro and at least give you the chance to reject it.
Here is how you can do that:

1) In MS Word 2007, click the MS Office button and then the Word Options button to display the Word Options screen.

2) Click the Trust Center navigation button to display the Trust Center options:

3) Click the Trust Center Settings button to display the Macro Settings screen:

I recommend you select the “Disable all macros with notification” option to be on the safe side while noticing what you are deleting.

“What if I trust the publisher and want to enable the macro?”

If there is a macro you trust and would like to enable, then you can  override the settings manually.
When you are opening a MS Word 2007 file with the above macro setting, Word displays the following warning:

Click Options to select from one of the following:

As you can see, if you like you can manually enable the macro easily by selecting the respective option button (the second one). Same goes with rejecting the macro (the first option) and trusting all macros from that specific publisher (the third option).