Office for Mac update size 'mystery' solved

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 16 April 2009 06:25

Business IT - Technology

Even the experts get it wrong sometimes. That observation is prompted by a comment made in Intego's Mac Security Blog about the sizes of this week's updates for Office for Mac 2004 and 2008.

As part of the April Patch Tuesday release, Microsoft this week updated Office 2004 and 2008. In addition to the usual stability, compatibility and performance improvements, the updates include security fixes.

In a blog post titled Microsoft Updates Office 2004 and 2008 for Vulnerabilities, an Intego official wrote "The Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.4 Update is only 9.7 MB, but the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.7 Update is a whopping 268 MB. It's not clear why there is such a difference, because Microsoft's descriptions of the two updates is the same."

There's a very simple explanation, and it comes in two parts.

Microsoft's practice with Office 2004 updates has been to make them incremental. So each new update requires that the previous one is already installed.

So you must have Office 2004 11.5.3 installed before you can apply this week's 11.5.4 update. 11.5.3 requires 11.5.2, and so on.

This has the advantage of keeping each update relatively small. The downside is that if you ever need to reinstall Office 2004, you'll have to apply multiple patches to get the suite up to date.

What happens with Office 2008? And what's the other reason for the variation in updater sizes? Find out on page two.