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Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

This is probably going to get lost in all of the discussion of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but just in case you feel like taking a break from all of that, Update Tuesday has delivered new updates to Office 2008 and Office 2004.

Office 2008 12.1.3 has suite-wide improvements in performance, stability, and security. It's also got some fixes that I'm sure will make some folks happy. In Word, we've made some improvements to our EndNote support. In PowerPoint, opening a file no longer changes the saved time timestamp. In Excel, we tracked down issues that caused "not enough memory" errors when saving. And in Entourage, we fixed a problem that would result in events being duplicated when viewed in Outlook or OWA. For full details, our knowledge base article for the update. To update to 12.1.3, you need to already have 12.1.2 installed.

Office 2004 11.5.2 has suite-wide improvements in reliability and security, as well as a couple of tweaks for Excel. The knowledge base article for the update has the full details. To install 11.5.2, you need to already have 11.5.1 installed.

As a bonus update, we also updated our standalone Office Open XML converters to make security improvements. The knowledge base article for the update has more details. To install this update, you need version 1 of the converter installed.

If you can drag yourself away from drooling over the new laptops (so sez the woman reconsidering whether she wants a MacBook Air), you can go forth and update.

Published Tuesday, October 14, 2008 2:38 PM by nadyne

Comments

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

Office 2008 is still not OSX 10.5 compatible. Fix the spaces issues!

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 7:29 AM by Tim Williams

# Spaces?

Thanks for the continued updates.

Do you plan to address the *still* wacky behavior between the Office apps and Spaces in Leopard? It's such a productivity drain to fight with toolboxes, toolbars, and document windows in order to simply keep them where they are supposed to be!

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 10:51 AM by Jerrod

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

Yeah, I know, the Spaces issues are really annoying.  I use Spaces too, and with a dual-monitor set-up, which exacerbates the whole thing.  :(

Make sure that you're updated with the latest Office and Leopard updates, since there have been some incremental improvements on both sides.  We're working really closely with Apple to get this one fixed, but it's a hairy problem.  The nanosecond an update goes out that fixes that, we'll be shouting from the rooftops.  We're looking forward to seeing the end of these issues just as much as you are.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 1:48 PM by nadyne

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

A friendly suggestion: You might want to use a word other than "bonus" when referring to security updates.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 3:49 PM by Pete

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

Would be nice if the download was available from Microsoft AutoUpdate. Doesn't appear to show up as of this moment - I have to go to the MS site.

As a side note, I always thought it was funky that the Mactopia site and the Microsoft Update site doesn't share the same design for visiting Mac users. You'd think that anything related to Office for Mac, whether it be support info or updates or product plugs would have that same black background. Alas.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 7:02 PM by Jeff

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

We've got a whole lot of servers, as you might imagine.  The web servers seem to get the update first, and it takes a bit more time to propagate through all of the AutoUpdate servers.  It's usually okay within 24 hours, but sometimes it takes longer.  The bits are the same, regardless of which method you use to download.

The Microsoft Update site is owned by Microsoft and not controlled by us.  They want it to be consistent with the rest of the Microsoft sites, instead of looking like ours. :/

Friday, October 17, 2008 8:09 PM by nadyne

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

flipping frustrating. That's what this is. The last update sync duplicated all my calendar events. This update now won't send calendar invites or updates. Seriously where is your Q&A?  To revert is a reinstall and then rapply all the updates one at a time. Nothing like wasting half a day doing that.

Saturday, October 18, 2008 10:30 AM by Anton

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

Anton - This update seems to have caused some issues with Exchange 2003.  There are more details on the Entourage MVP blog.  Read these two posts for a couple of workarounds for the invite sending issue:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems.html

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems_part_2.html

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 11:35 AM by nadyne

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

Hi,

Do you know when the bug with Office and Spaces will be resolved? I'm referring to the windows jump around in random spaces instead of staying in the one they are assigned to.

Thanks

Thursday, October 23, 2008 8:09 PM by Mike

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

Schwieb, one of our senior developers, posted something about Office 2008 and Spaces today:

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/

It's a really long post, but there's a lot of meat there -- Schwieb didn't skimp on details.  If you only care about the Spaces issue, skip down to about the halfway point.

Friday, October 24, 2008 1:08 AM by nadyne

# re: Office 2008 12.1.3 and Office 2004 11.5.2 available now

I have been waiting ever since 12.1.0 for a version that BOTH works with EndNote and doesn't mess up graphics from PC Office. I converted to a Mac in Dec 07 and had literally hundreds of document and PPT files that I use for my teaching and research (I work in Pathology at UNSW in Sydney) that I wanted to be able to open properly on the Mac side of MBP rather than in Parallels. Office 2004 couldn't do this, but Office 2008 handled the graphics perfectly -- I was most impressed. I thought that the addition of EndNote compatibility would be in incremental process, but I was wrong -- the graphics capability was destroyed with 12.1.0 and was not fixed with 12.1.1, 12.12 or 12.1.3. So I have become very good at rebuilding my MBP from Time Machine (did the 5th such today) but am no nearer a solution. Would be happy to provide sample files to illustrate the problems if you can tell me to whom I should email them.

Best wishes,

Rakesh

r.kumar@unsw.edu.au

Sunday, October 26, 2008 11:58 PM by Rakesh

# Office 12.1.4 available now

Office 12.1.4 fixes the issues that some Entourage users were having with sending and responding to Exchange invites.

Thursday, October 30, 2008 2:18 PM by go ahead, mac my day
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