Microsoft Forgets Mac Users on Patch Tuesday

For a few days last week, Microsoft Corp. temporarily had Macintosh amnesia as it omitted mention of the Mac edition of Office in a write-up that accompanied one of Tuesday's security updates.

On Thursday, however, the company remembered that it supports Apple Inc.'s operating system, and it revised Security Bulletin MS07-036, one of the three patch collections graded "critical," to include Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac among the afflicted programs.

The three vulnerabilities in Excel on the Mac detailed by MS07-036 were all graded "important" in Microsoft's four-level threat-scoring system, one peg below the topmost "critical." The "important" ranking was the same as for all Windows versions of Excel, except for the spreadsheet included with Office 2000. "These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Excel file," Microsoft said in the bulletin.

Actually, only the patch side of Microsoft blanked on the Mac's edition vulnerabilities; the company's Mac development group had posted an update, designated 11.3.6, on Tuesday. The 15.4MB update, available in English, German, Spanish, Japanese and four other localized editions, can be downloaded from Mactopia.com, Microsoft's Mac-specific site.