Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 08:36
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
The introduction of Office 2007 brought a wave of document compatibility issues for users of Office 2004, but Microsoft has at last delivered a non-beta version of its Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. And while ODF support has been promised for Office 2007 SP2, there's no sign of it for Office 2008.
The converter has been released alongside extensive updates for Office 2004 and 2008.
If the converter is installed, the 11.5.0 update for Office 2004 can take advantage of it to read and write Open XML documents (typically created by Office 2007 or 2008).
Filetypes supported by the converter are .docx, .docm, .xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm, .xlam, .pptx, .pptm, .potx, .potm, .ppsx and .ppsm.
Notable by their absence are .dotx and .dotm.
The converter package also contains a selection of fonts supplied with Office 2007 - Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Candara - but it seems they are only installed if Office 2004 is present.
If a beta version of the converter has previously been installed on a particular computer, it should be updated to version 1.0 before Office 2004 is updated to version 11.5.0 or later.
The conversion is not without its limitations. Top of the list is "Word 2007 Equation objects are not preserved," which could be a real bummer for technical users. Still, they're no worse off than they were before the converter was released.
If you do run into problems, check the (extensive) list of known issues in
Information about how to work with Open XML Format files in Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac.
What else does the Office 2004 update do for you? See
page 2.
