> t's getting to the point where simply opening a Microsoft Office document is roughly the same as opening a random .exe file.

This isn't exactly new. In fact it was much worse the late 90s / early 00s, the heyday of windows viruses. There was absolutely no security, opening an excel document automatically meant running arbitrary code that had full system access (via COM, etc). Many viruses spread over email by word and excel documents.

At least now, macros execution is disabled by default. Unless you explicitly enable automatic macro execution on all documents, I wouldn't be too worried about opening a documents. Of course, there's the occasional vuln (http://georgemauer.net/2017/10/07/csv-injection.html) but excel isn't exactly the only software with occasional findings of execution vulnerabilities.

Printing requires enabling macros. Most people knee-jerk-click «enable editing» anyway.