Office for Mac 11.3.5 more than a security update

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 09 May 2007 08:56

Business IT - Technology

While most users will regard security as the most pressing reason to install Microsoft's Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.5 Update, there are other changes.

A number of performance and reliability fixes are also delivered in this update. Generally speaking, they are of minor significance - but if only one of them banishes a bug that's been annoying you, the minor inconvenience of closing all your Office applications long enough to install the update will pay off.

So, what's fixed?

All applications benefit from a performance improvement when files or objects are dragged into an Office program's window. If your system is as heavily loaded as mine tends to be (too many pages open in Safari and Firefox is a major culprit!), any improvement - however fleeting - is welcome.

Word now displays its full version number in the About Word dialog. Not very important for most of us, but spare a thought for your tech support guy or gal who may need to know exactly which version you're running.

Excel should no longer unexpectedly open workbooks or files when it is launched. That's not a problem I've seen, but it was a bug that deserved to be stamped on.

PowerPoint stability is improved when opening presentations. A well-behaved program shouldn't crash when you ask it to open a document.

Entourage users will be pleased to hear that the program should no longer "stop responding for several minutes during ordinary use." I hoping this will fix the extremely sluggish operation I sometimes experience when using Office's mail program.

You can get the update via the Microsoft AutoUpdate utility or by direct download from Microsoft's web site.