Office for Mac update size 'mystery' solved

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 16 April 2009 07:25

Business IT - Technology

With Office 2008, Microsoft's taken a different tack. Each update is delivered in the form of a 'roll up' updater. This means it can be applied to any minor version of the software since the last major update.

So this week's 12.1.7 update can be applied to any Office 2008 installation as long as it has had the 12.1.0 (aka SP1) update or later.

So you should never need to apply more than two updates to bring Office 2008 right up to date. The other side of the coin is that the updaters tend get progressively larger with each release.

For example, the 12.1.7 update is 268M, while 12.1.3 (the only previous 2008 updater I could find on my system) was 154M.

If it helps, think of it in terms of Apple's updates for Mac OS X. Office 2004 uses the ordinary (incremental) updates, Office 2008 uses combo updates.

So what's the second reason?

There's a lot more code in Office 2008.

Apart from any changes to the product itself, Office 2008 is delivered as a universal binary. That is, it includes PowerPC and Intel code.

Office 2004, on the other hand, is PowerPC only.

That largely explains why my Microsoft Office 2008 folder takes up 952M of disk space, while Microsoft Office 2004 occupies a 'mere' 525M.

So despite Intego's remark, there's no mystery in the relative sizes of the Office 2004 and 2008 updaters.