Excel & Flash Games

[Gatt]

OK this is the latest craze to hit the school

Pupils embedding Flash games (eg PacMan, Sonic, etc) inside Excel Spreadsheets - making it virtually impossible to find them unless they give them names like "pacman.xls"

Does anyone know how to disable flash within Excel? I know its an ActiveX control, but I can only find out how to disable every ActiveX object and not specific (eg Shockwave Flash)

[Geoff]

This is possible in Office 2007 but not any prior version AFAIK.

[Gatt]

Bugger

Moving to 2007 in September so will try and get it sorted then

[tom_newton]

Well worth searching your drives for .xls over a certain size - have a look at some "average" dox, I bet you could come up with a decent guess easily enough

[tom_newton]

Suggestion #2: Look for xls with the same name appearing loads - sure someone could do vbs for this, afraid i'm a perl/shell sort of guy :-P

Suggestion #3: Block downloads of .xls

[Ric_]

This is possible in Office 2003 too Geoff... had a spate of this a couple of weeks ago and came down HARD on the pupils!

The foolish kids didn't rename the files so a search for sonic.xls, pacman.xls and others was very fruitful.

[Craig_W]

I've just found Sonic(1).xls on a teachers home drive!! Probably gives it to the kids!!

[Silvor]

Hi All,

Has anyone reached a solution with this? It's just hit our school (took them a while to pick it up though) and we're having trouble blocking it etc. We can't block downloads of XLS or DOC...

[tomscaper]

The best i could do regarding this was to keep a copy of it myself and do a search for *xls on the student drive and compare file sizes. Sometimes you can find them straight away as they rename pacman.xls to dfdhdkdfkd.xls how original, but some are clever and rename it to it coursework.xls.
It is long winded but it better than searching them one by one. Other than that i have no idea.
Again it should be the teachers watching the kids are not playing games in lessons. But they tend to be far to busy drinking there tea.

[Joanne]

I'm always deleting these damn falsh games. They just copy them back over from their flash drives though. Doing searches for large excel files is the best bet... open any that might not be games to check (just in case).

Also... make sure you have a good backup incase you get delete key happy like I sometimes do! hehe.

[Joanne]

the sonic one is over a meg for peoples info

[tomscaper]

if they have there usb drives connected you can create a shared in the computer management to that drive on the computer and delete the games off. But i would never do that tho.

[tomscaper]

if your interested here are the names and sizes

[Geoff]

Does anyone have the hashes? Seems a FRP hash rule would do the job?

[sahmeepee]

We fixed this when we came across the problem by using the sysinternals strings command to search for xls files containing a particular string (i imagine it was .swf).

You can just leave it running against your pupil user areas. Because it's only looking at xls files and the spreadsheets they make tend to be tiny it's pretty quick.

UPDATE: Here's the batch file contents.. change paths as necessary

@cd /d "e:\user data"
"E:\Batch Files\strings.exe" -s *.xls | findstr \.swf > "E:\Batch Files\XLS-GameSearchOutput.txt"