Bugs squashed, vulnerabilities patched and info updated in Office for Mac

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 13 August 2008 08:59

Business IT - Technology

Excel 2008 can now open workbooks containing sheet names that include invalid characters such as / (it's not unknown for people to use / as a date separator when naming sheets) or that contain a range that extends over more than one row and is sorted left-to-right.

A couple of Excel changes address regional-specific issues. One avoids formula errors when the international format is set to New Zealand, the other overcomes number formatting errors associated with some non-US regions.

In addition, there's an overall improvement in calculation speed, and the program is now able to save workbooks in .xlsx format after a PivotTable report has been copied into it.

Moving on to Entourage, fixes for Sync Services mean items in Entourage and iCal should no longer be duplicated, and all contacts in Entourage of Address Book should no longer be deleted and recreated. Given the growing use of sync in conjunction with iPhones and other mobile devices, this is an important bug fix.

Staying with the calendar theme, a cancelled instance of a recurring meeting is no longer re-added to the organiser's calendar if a response is received from someone invited to attend.

Although not identified by Microsoft as a security issue, Entourage now generates an appropriate warning if an attempted SSL connection involves a mismatch between the server and the certificate it presents.

Details of more Entourages fixes and updates can be found on the final page.