A variant of this language existed in Word 2.0 for Windows, but these macro viruses only run on the version of Word. Basic in Word 6.0 and later. Macintosh versions of Word earlier than 6.0 do not have a macro language though converters are available to allow Word 5 to read Word 6 files. Any Word 6 files converted to Word 5 will have all their macros removed during the conversion process and cannot be infected with a virus. 6 and 7 or any document in Word version 8.
Template files can contain text just like a normal document, but they can also hold macros.
To get executed on your system, macro viruses take advantage of the fact that if a macro is named AutoOpen or AutoClose the macro is run automatically when a document is opened or closed. These two methods allow a macro to be run without the user explicitly running the macro or even realizing that he has done so. When a macro virus has gotten onto a system and is run, the first thing it does is to see if it is in the normal.dot template file or in a document. If the virus is running on the normal.dot template, it looks for a document to infect. When it has infected a document, it saves that document as a Word template file but changes the file name to end in .DOC instead of .DOT, to make the file appear to be a document instead of a template.