The productivity suites for Mac from Microsoft, past and present, received a patch this week to resolve security issues and improve performance. While the 2004 version only got the security patches, the 2008 update, to version 12.2.3, boasts the following fixes to all apps in the suite:

• Security is improved. This update fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2008 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. For more information, see the security bulletin that is listed earlier in this document.
• Stability is improved. This update fixes an issue that causes Office 2008 applications to close unexpectedly when you open or use Office 2008 applications.
• Windows Office documents to which metafiles are attached now contain the correct text spacing when they are opened in Office 2008 for Mac. This update fixes text spacing issues that occur when you use Office 2008 for Mac to open a Windows Office document to which an OLE object or a metafile is attached.

There are also specific tweaks to the individual suite apps, and a passel of bug fixes for the (relatively) new Microsoft Document Connection for Mac utility. The 350MB updater requires Office 12.1.0 or later and Mac OS X 10.4.9.

While my experience is probably idiosyncratic, I did have a rather nasty sequence of events after updating my home machine to the new Office version: my Entourage database went belly-up and had to be rebuilt. Once the rebuild was done and Entourage was relaunched, more badness ensued; due to a yet-to-be-isolated issue, all of the mail, contacts and calendar entries in my connected Exchange 2003 account went poof and had to be restored from a backup. Not my best day ever.

I'm inclined to believe that this snafu was specific to my bloated database file and my Exchange config, and not something likely to hit most users... nevertheless, you might consider backing up your Office 2008 Identities folder (which contains your Entourage mail & PIM data) prior to the update.

As you probably recall, Microsoft dropped Visual Basic from Office for the Mac with Office 2008. At the time, I was working for a company that had a huge investment in systems that relied on Visual Basic, and that change was a real blow. In fact, we didn't upgrade past Office 2004 just to avoid trouble and plan our next step.

If anyone else is using Office 2004 for that reason, here's a thin shard of hope for you. This week, Microsoft's Office for Mac Team announced that mainstream support or Office '04, scheduled to end on October 13, 2009, will be extended through January 10, 2012.

Why extend support? As the blog post notes, Visual Basic support will return in the next major release of Office for the Mac, scheduled to hit the stands in 2010. This way, folks reliant on VB will be able to hold on until that new release is available. This is good news for anyone who was wondering how to migrate from a slew of mission-critical scripts.

One feature of Mac OS X, sometimes forgotten about, that has caused gripes from many users for a long time is Spaces. When it was first introduced almost two years ago in Leopard, some applications would not always "play nice" with each other, causing windows not to display or move correctly.

Microsoft Office applications in particular were prone to these problems. There were always some nagging issues that would not allow Spaces to work correctly, due to the way Office windows are drawn on the screen. Over time, they started working better, but a few issues still remained with Office, especially in Word when the Toolbox floating window was in use.

With Snow Leopard's debut, however, Microsoft states that these issues have been fixed through "collaborative efforts" with Apple. Hopefully, this will help a lot of eager and frustrated Spaces users manage their many windows on their desktops.

Do you use Spaces, or have you held off because of these issues? Leave a comment below and share your experiences!

A few weeks back, Microsoft released its Service Pack 2 update for Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. While adding a host of features and refinements (such as Custom Path Animation in PowerPoint and increased speed and load times in Word and Excel), the service pack apparently packed too much of a punch.

The update has prevented some Open XML files from opening, for which Microsoft provides the following suggestions, and I've done a bit of MS-to-English translation (with apologies to DF)... read on to get the gist.

Each day the TUAW crew awakes from our hyperbaric chambers, slides down the firepole in our historic 2-story firehouse and gathers around the Surface table to discuss what we're going to write about. Oh wait, that's in an alternate universe I just made up. In reality, the TUAW team is a diverse group of freelancers based all over the world, working from their home offices to find Apple stories for you.

There's no office except our chat room, no break room except our Twitter feeds and no daily editorial bull session with the team. It doesn't work like that. Instead, we all wake up at different times, read different sources, write different stuff and share different opinions. Everyone has a "day job" of some nature outside of TUAW, be it cubicle farmer or freelance pixel pusher. I'm pretty thrilled we've been able to do this for over four years now and our independence and focus hasn't changed.

While you can't take a tour of our real-world offices, some of our bloggers are sharing pics of their workspaces. Everyone has a very different setup, as you can see. Want to share your own setup? Tag a picture on Flickr with "tuaw" and we'll check it out.

Today, Microsoft released the Office 2008 Service Pack 2 update. This update brings many improvements and fixes to Office 2008, including improved speed and stability to Word and Excel, new features in PowerPoint, as well as improvements to connecting to SharePoint servers. A brief list of fixes follows below:

• Two new features in PowerPoint 2008: Custom Path Animation, which adds the ability to author motion-path animations and Default Theme, which lets users define their default theme, including fonts, color scheme and slide layouts.

• Increased speed in Word 2008 (launch and scroll times) as well as Excel 2008 with features such as calculation performance.

• Expanded Mac browser support in Microsoft Office Live Workspace to include Safari 4.

• Microsoft Document Connection. Document Connection is a new application that improves the SharePoint experience for Mac users, allowing for easier collaboration within a SharePoint environment by simplifying how users can browse, access and manage files online and offline.

For a complete lists of changes and fixes, visit this description page.

To download this update, run the Microsoft AutoUpdate application on your Mac or go to the Microsoft Mac Downloads page. This update weighs in at 182.6 MB and is available right now.

Ah, summertime; the kids are out of school, the pace drops back from 'overdrive' to 'merely hectic,' and you finally have the opportunity to tackle the giant looming crisis that is your personal state of disorganization. Perhaps I'm projecting a little bit. Anyway, if you're looking for a bit of guidance on how your Mac can help you get organized -- and, of course, if you are a Microsoft Office 2008 owner -- the Mac BU has something for you.

Organization expert Peter Walsh (possessor of a charming Australian accent, and author of the slightly-less-charmingly titled Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat) is the host of a video tips presentation over at the Mactopia site. Walsh runs through a couple of suggestions for reducing the chaos in the three key areas of Family, Finance & Health, mostly on the straightforward side (keep a family calendar in Entourage, track your website logins in a secured Excel spreadsheet). Walsh encourages us to envision the end state of the life we want instead of the many steps that may be required to arrive there.

Unfortunately, the delivery mechanism for these helpful tips is a bit less than helpful. The presentation requires the Silverlight plugin, which lots of folks avoid on principle. You can neither download nor rewind the segments; it would seem that for anything intended to help you reduce chaos and clutter, providing the tips in podcastable and mobile-friendly formats would be a nice gesture towards the overscheduled.

On top of that, the tips seem a bit forced into Office's capabilities rather than organically built. While there are more optimal Mac or iPhone single-purpose apps for these tasks (or even multitaskers like Bento), it's true that Office is installed on a lot of Macs and a lot of Mac users could probably leverage it to achieve some organizational goals.

With all that in mind, if you feel like you could use a light organizational boost and you enjoy making spreadsheets of your car maintenance appointments, check it out.

Update: One thing I meant to mention but forgot: Entourage is a bit of an odd choice for a familial calendar, as it doesn't offer native sharing outside of an Exchange environment (an unlikely setup for parents & kids). Adding BusySync makes it much more flexible, but you're just as well off using iCal in that situation.

[h/t The Loop]

There's an update in town, and it's all about locking it down: the 12.1.7 update to Microsoft Office 2008 (available within the suite via the software update tool, or downloadable from Microsoft) closes two security holes present in multiple versions of Microsoft Excel and first acknowledged by the company in February. These vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to create a specially-configured Excel file that, when opened, would allow full control of the target machine.

The update package also bundles up all the previous patches to Office 2008, which lends it heft (it weighs in at over 150 MB) but simplifies matters if you're a few revs behind. Note that there is no 12.1.6 update in the sequence; the previous patch level was 12.1.5.

If you haven't made the leap to Office 2008 yet (perhaps you're on a PPC Mac; perhaps you feel that you get better interoperability with Office 2003 users on Windows; perhaps you have to have Visual Basic support for macros), Microsoft is giving you the chance to consider moving up with a full-featured 30-day demo of Office 2008, now available for download in the USA. The package includes all the Office apps and can be upgraded to a paid license in the field without purchasing a boxed copy and reinstalling. Upgrades from previous editions of Office start at $240... of course, there are some less expensive alternatives out there.

[h/t Ars Technica]

In the hustle and madness of yesterday's wayback machine activity, there were a couple of App Store introductions (and a notable upgrade) that might have slipped through...

First up: The long-awaited version of Quickoffice for iPhone that allows editing of Word and Excel files hit the store today and was demoed at CTIA. [Looks like the new Quicksheet is available now, but the full bundle and the Quickword standalone app aren't on sale yet as of Thursday morning.] While QO has had a 'mobile files' tool on the iPhone for a while now, this is the first build of the venerable portable office suite (which has been a favorite on Palm handhelds for years) that can do editing in both formats.

Quickoffice for iPhone can do font formatting and cut, copy and paste within Word documents -- presumably to be tied in with system-wide C/P in the OS 3.0 world-to-come. Both the Excel and Word tools will support landscape mode for extra editing area.

Files on the iPhone can be transferred off the device using WiFi to a local Mac, or straight to a MobileMe account. Quickoffice for iPhone is shipping now for an "introductory price" of $19.99, but if you just want the Excel spreadsheet editor (formerly MobileFiles Pro) you can have it for $12.99; the Word document editor is also $12.99. Quickoffice Files (previously known as MobileFiles 2.0) is $3.99 and offers similar file transfer capability to Readdle and other file managers. We're getting a review copy for a more thorough walkthrough later this week. It's worth noting that a Microsoft exec hinted at a version of Office itself for the iPhone that may be coming sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Second... who doesn't love a good robot game? For $4.99, you can now dive into Pangea's classic Otto Matic series with the company's new title for iPhone, Otto Matic: Alien Invasion. The B-movie style game pits Otto against the attacking Brain Aliens from Planet X; his job is to save as many humans as possible. Otto Matic: Alien Invasion features 10 levels and 25 different enemies, multiple weapons and activities, and quite a bit of fun.

Lastly, the TUAW top pick Evernote has been updated with a nifty landscape mode, thumbnail viewing, improved performance, favorites sorting, and an embedded web browser to reduce the tap a link --> Safari --> back to home screen --> scroll around --> relaunch Evernote loop-the-loop annoyances. Evernote 2.0 for iPhone remains a free download, and the basic Evernote service is also free; a year of pro-level service costs $45.

We had a lot of mail from users eager to let us know that the NeoOffice 3.0 is now available. NeoOffice is a Mac OS X native open-source office suite originally crafted from the code used for OpenOffice, and its developers are boasting about the following features not found in the current release of OpenOffice for Mac:

• OS X Services support
• Media Browser support
• Native floating tool windows
• Magnify and swipe trackpad gestures
• Menus available when no documents are open
• Import images from scanners and cameras
• Command-clicking on window titlebar
• Mac OS X Leopard grammar checking support

A more in-depth look at these features can be found here. The suite is a fantastic alternative to paying full price for Microsoft Office and has come a long way in the past few years.

NeoOffice 3.0 is a universal binary offers separate Intel and PPC packages, and it requires OS X 10.4 or higher, 512 MB of RAM and 400 MB of free disk space. Please note that Universal Access support from OpenOffice is not available on NeoOffice at this time, so using OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, or iWork is suggested to access that feature. A token donation is requested of all downloaders to help support the project.

According to the Washington Post, the incoming U.S. presidential administration has inherited quite the challenging IT environment: The White House.

President Obama's staff -- accustomed to Macs, social media, and having the latest equipment -- found Windows PCs with Microsoft Office 2003 in their new offices. Laptops were "scarce," apparently, and the team had trouble finding ways to update the redesigned White House website and add subtitles to web videos. Perhaps they were misled by the prominence of Mac hardware in the fictional-but-familiar West Wing version of the executive mansion.

Valleywag's Owen Thomas suggests that Obama's staff are "whiners." "Outside the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley's startup cube farms, this is how most Americans work. Want a Macintosh? Sorry, IT hasn't approved it. Oh, you need to use Facebook to interact with customers? Sorry, that site's blocked -- and management suspects that 'social media' is a buzzword which means 'getting paid to waste time chatting with friends.'"

Part of the reason for the White House's legacy systems is related to the need to retain all computer records for the National Archives, and protect all kinds of communication (from emails to IMs to tweets) on the network for national security reasons. This task isn't impossible with a Mac -- some might say it's easier to accomplish with a Mac than with a PC -- but there will be a lot of sleepless nights for the White House's new IT staff while the new system is set up. Meanwhile, the tech-friendly new Commander in Chief appears to have won his first geek battle; he is going to get to keep his Blackberry [or something like it; Engadget clarifies that we don't know the details yet, but press secretary Robert Gibbs said it was indeed a BlackBerry during today's press briefing (his first) -Ed.] subject to a security overhaul by an unnamed federal agency (assumed to be the NSA).

With the new administration's focus on change, it seems as though a new tech infrastructure and business rules for the executive office of the President are in the cards. It remains to be seen if our favorite platform, though, makes the cut.

Thanks to Michael and Joe for sending this in.

How long is two weeks? If you're vacationing someplace warm and sunny, it might seem to pass in a flash; if you're in bed with the flu, it probably seems like a lifetime. For Office 2008 users who got bit by a bug in the recent 12.1.3 update, chances are the latter assessment is more on target. Those who ran the 12.1.3 update and met a particular set of criteria (Entourage users connected to Exchange + a secondary POP or IMAP account for personal email) found themselves unable to send calendar invitations or reply to meeting requests. The most straightforward fix was a rollback to the 12.1.2 version; otherwise, using a webmail client or Outlook was the best way to manage calendars. Not fun.

Two weeks, though, is what it took for the Mac Business Unit to get a tested patch out the door that resolves this problem. Today, Product Manager Andy Ruff announced on the Mactopia support forum that Office 2008 12.1.4 is now available for download (16 MB, requires 12.1.3 installed), billed as follows:

This update fixes a calendar issue in versions of Microsoft Entourage that were updated with the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update. The issue prevents Exchange accounts in Entourage from sending meeting invitations and responses. This issue can occur when an Entourage identity is configured with more than one mail account. We strongly recommend that all Entourage users who installed Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update install this update.

While this particular fortnight may have been difficult for Entourage users, I will say that this is definitely the fastest response to an Office bug that I have ever seen from the Mac BU; in terms of the development cycle on a suite as large as Office 2008, it's an eyeblink. Kudos to the MBU for its quick action; now, the next prudent PR step is a little bit of transparency about why this bug -- which should have been fairly obvious to anyone who tested with both Exchange and POP accounts configured in the same identity -- managed to make it through to the release.

Update: Wow, talk about your rapid response... Andy has posted an explanation of the issue and the testing circumstances at the Mac Mojo blog. The missing piece of the puzzle, apparently, was account creation order: if the Exchange account was added to Entourage after the POP or IMAP setup, the problem got triggered -- a condition that never made it onto the testing radar. Points for transparency: awarded.

Erik Schwiebert is one of the lead developers on the Mac Business Unit team under the Microsoft banner. I find their position constantly interesting -- even in these enlightened days of Safari for Windows, many dyed-in-the-wool Mac users still consider Microsoft the enemy, and yet the Mac BU has always been like a kind of diplomatic envoy. We have to use things like Office and Entourage, so we cautiously let them across the border, regarding them like strange visitors from the other side of the wall.

But maybe that's just all in my mind. Recently, the Mac BU released an update for Office 2008, and lots of users, apparently, have suffered from error problems while trying to install it. So many, in fact, that Schwiebert has responded to the problems on his blog, saying that the problems are most likely because users have deleted or otherwise messed with files inside the installation, causing the installer to abort. And that strange Mac BU/Mac users fragile truce comes into play here as well -- he specifically calls out Xslimmer and Monolingual, two programs that delete often-unnecessary files in OS X, for causing the issues.

There's a workaround floating around, but Schwiebert warns it leaves the application suite in a possibly unstable and unsupportable state. Unfortunately, Schwiebert doesn't really offer any solutions (other, we guess, than to reinstall the software so that it's back to the full install, and then apply the update). And the alliance between the Mac BU and their users remains fragile -- we've got to work together, but it seems that many are unhappy about it.

Earlier today, Microsoft released the 12.1.2 update to Microsoft Office 2008, downloadable via MS Software Update and from the MS website. The 160 MB update requires Office 12.1.1 and, in addition to security fixes, resolves several bugs. The hit list includes two of my personal annoyances: Word's sluggish launch speed and Entourage's insistence on truncating URLs after the ampersand character. The full list of changes is in the continuation of this post.

Installed the update? Let us know if you see any dramatic performance changes, gotchas or improvements.

Thanks to Erik Schwiebert for the heads-up (and best wishes from TUAW for a speedy recovery).

Microsoft has released a "critical" Office 2008 update, 12.1.1, which "contains several improvements to enhance stability and performance."

Several issues are fixed with the updates, including charting problems, Entourage crashing when the computer wakes from sleep, and issues regarding converting documents to and from the Open XML Format. A complete list of improvements is available in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

The update can be installed via Microsoft AutoUpdate (accessible by choosing "Check for Updates" in any Office application's Help menu) or from Microsoft directly. The update is a 153MB DMG file, and is available in 11 languages.

Thanks, Tommy!