How are macro viruses different from other types of computer viruses?
Macro viruses differ from other types of computer viruses in the manner in which they spread and in their ability to move between different computing platforms. Before macro viruses, there were basically two ways to become infected by a virus. The first, and most common, was to boot your computer with an infected disk, which then infected your hard drive. After the hard drive was infected, any non-write-protected \ disk inserted in the infected computer became a “carrier” for the virus. The second way to become infected was to run an infected application, which, in turn, usually infected all of the applications you ran subsequently. Macro viruses, however, use the most valuable part of your computer, your data, as the means of infection. For example, a document is created using a copy of Microsoft Word that has a macro virus — the document then becomes infected with the same virus. The file is passed to you and you open the file in your copy of Word. The act of opening the file infect
