Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 08:36
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
There are the always-popular stability improvements. Notably, it fixes problems that could cause Word 2004 on Mac OS X 10.5 to quit when doing something as innocuous as creating a new document, printing, or using print preview.
Several fixes address compatibility issues previously occurring when documents created in Office 2007 or 2008 are opened in Office 2004, or when data is pasted between Office 2008 and 2004 documents.
The 11.5.0 update incorporates all previous updates for Office 2004, so there are no problems with prerequisites. However, this does result in a hefty 59M download.
Turning to Office 2008, the 12.1.1 update provides (you guessed it!) stability improvements as well as fixes for specific issues.
In particular, it overcomes a widely encountered problem delivered by Office 2008 SP1 that prevented the opening of some Word and Excel documents (most commonly those downloaded from a web site) by double-clicking in the Finder.
Items in Notebook Layout are now correctly preserved when a .docx file is subsequently saved as a .doc file or opened with the standalone Open XML Converter.
PowerPoint benefits from a change that speeds the opening of presentations containing certain fonts, while Entourage users should no longer crash when the system wakes from sleep.
I frequently use sleep while Entourage is running, and I've never encountered that problem. I'm just hoping Microsoft has been able to make Entourage preserve the scroll position during sleep - if you leave a window halfway down a mailbox list, it's annoying to wake the Mac and find yourself back at the top.
You'll find Microsoft's full description of the update
here.
If you thought 59M was a lot for the Office 2004 update, take a deep breath before downloading 153M for Office 2008.
Now, what about ODF? Please
read on.
