Microsoft extends support for Mac Office 2004

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 14 October 2009 02:09

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft has announced that Mainstream Support for Macintosh Office 2004, originally scheduled to end today, will run for another two years. The reason for the extension is to provide continuous support for Visual Basic for Applications.

According to a post on Microsoft's Mac Mojo blog, most Mac Office customers have upgraded to Office 2008.

But Office 2008 doesn't include support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), so some users have stayed with Office 2004, which did.

That would have left those users without VBA support until the next version of Office for Mac comes out, which is supposed to restore VBA functionality. That next version is due out by next year's holiday season.

So Microsoft has extended Mainstream Support for Office 2004 through January 10, 2012, "specifically to ensure continuous cross-platform compatibility for Office 2004 customers reliant on VBA."

Mainstream Support refers to Microsoft's primary post-release support phase and includes security updates and nonsecurity bug fixes. The latter, for example, requires a purchased agreement once a product enters the Extended Support phase.

The blog post also states that it's Microsoft's policy to support Office 2004 and 2008 "side-by-side," so customers can keep both versions on their machines, using the newer one unless they need specific VBA features.