We are excited to announce that Microsoft Office will begin publishing Office symbols for Windows via the Microsoft Public Symbol Server on August 9th 2022. The publication of Office symbols is a part of our continuing investment to improve security and performance for customers and partners.
Security: Empowering the security community to protect customer s
Performance: faster diagnostics and testing
Symbols empower customers and partners to better understand and potentially diagnose issues they’re encountering. They also open the door for the development of more advanced performance tools and insights.
Symbol files are created by the compiler when you build your project. Symbol files contain information - symbols - that the debugger uses while analyzing a program.
Some basic symbols, such as function names, global variables, are needed for even the most rudimentary debugging and are called _public symbols _while files containing additional information like local variables and line numbers are called _private symbols. _Symbol files that contain public symbols alone are called _stripped symbol files – _which Microsoft Office will be publishing on the Symbol Server
You can access Office symbols via the Microsoft Public Symbol Server.
Microsoft makes certain symbols, binary code, and other executables available via the Microsoft Symbol Server for use in debugging and testing of the user’s software in connection with Microsoft software, and not for any unauthorized use. Please refer to the Microsoft License Terms - Microsoft Symbol Server.
We will be publishing symbols for the following builds and future builds, on a continuing basis, as each new build is released:
We’re excited to begin publishing Office symbols to improve diagnostics and testing and empower Office security research as part of Microsoft’s holistic approach to defending against security threats.
Sparsh Saxena | Product Manager (Office), Shane Guthrie | Sr. Product Manager (Office)