Good-ish news, for people wanting to upgrade – Microsoft have finally brought out the upgrade to Office 2004 that allows it to convert and read the Office 2008 file formats.

The Open XML File Format converter is the starting point – this allows conversion of documents saved in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for PC file formats. It can do single or batch conversion. After that, the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 update integrates with the format converter, allowing Office 2004 to seamlessly open documents from the newer versions of office. This allows you to run both versions in parallel, and exchange documents in the new Office file formats.

What we can’t understand is why these functions weren’t released at the same time as Office 2007. Or why VBA isn’t implemented in Office 2008 for Mac. We know that there are very many large companies for whom this is essential.

Us? We fall on the other side of the 80:20 functionality rules, and Pages is quite good enough for us. And faster. And it also reminds us of Ami Pro, still our favourite word-processor ever, even if it was on a PC.

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office 2008, office 2004