Update Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac

Remember the recent "phantom update" for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac? Let me tell you a few words about it before moving on... Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that security updates for Mac will be available, and they became available as promised. Nothing wrong so far, but those security updates were in pre-release state, and Microsoft blamed a human error for this happening.

If you managed to download that update, then you had to waste some time to repair your Office, since Erik Schwiebert, a Microsoft developer, said that "Unfortunately, there's no easy way to uninstall it without going back to the original Office CD and doing a clean install followed by applying the latest full updater." To make the problem more interesting, the update page remained online for a while with the download link not working, and that made a lot of people go "WTF?"...

A really interesting story, don't you think? I know that those who happened to install the bad updates don't agree with that, and I understand them, but yesterday Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.2 Update. This time, it's for real, or at least that's what I know about it at this time...

I can guarantee you that the download link works, and the Redmond-based company says "This update contains several improvements for PowerPoint and Entourage. Applies to: Office 2004 Standard Edition, Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition, Office 2004 Professional Edition, Word 2004, Excel 2004, PowerPoint 2004, Entourage 2004."

After 16 years, Office for Mac OS got to version 11.3.2, and although Office 2004 and X, its previous version, runs non-natively on Intel-based Macs using Rosetta, Microsoft won't update Office 2004 for the "Mactels", but will release the next version of Office for Mac as an Universal Binary able to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel platforms. When is this going to happen? Well, this is something that a lot of people are asking, and no information is available at this time.