Mac Office Updaters Available

This chapter of the Microsoft Office for Mac update debacle appears to have drawn to a close. The Office for Mac team has just posted links to the updates for Office 2004 and Office v. X.

These updates are the final versions of the updates that were accidentally leaked last week. If the leaks caused you any confusion, these updates will set you straight. So, Mac Office users should go get the legit updates now.

These patches address stability and and security issues, but they do not contain the file format converters allowing Mac users to read the new Microsoft Office Open XML format, the new document format native to Office 2007. Here's that story from the MacBU's post earlier this month:

There will be a delta between general availability of Win Office (January) and converters from MacBU (expected late March/early April.) We realize this will be an inconvenience for some of you (trust me, we know - 90% of Microsoft has been dogfooding Office 2007 for many months, and we in the MacBU are well used to asking for down-reved versions ourselves). For now, we recommend that Mac users advise their friends and colleagues using Office 2007 to save their documents as a "Word/Excel/PowerPoint 97-2003 Document" (.doc, .xls, .ppt) to ensure the documents can be shared across platforms.

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