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Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit has released three updates for its Mac Office products. Office 2008, Office 2004 and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac are all available from the company's Web site.

Office 2008 for Mac

Overall, Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.1 includes stability enhancements that should take care of problems causing the applications to quit when launched. There are several enhancements to individual products in the suite too.

Word 2008 now preserves spaces between words when you open a document that was created in or saved by Word 2008 for Mac or by Microsoft Office Word 2007. Macros are also preserved when you save a document.

Word documents now open correctly when you download it from the Web and items in Notebook Layout documents are preserved when the document is converted. The update also fixes an issue where font text was not preserved for text in tables.

Microsoft's spreadsheet application, Excel, has a few updates including accepting International decimal separators for error bars. Reliability has been improved when chart data is updated, workbooks open correctly when downloaded from the Web and reliability has been improved when editing a formula. Excel also improved PivotTable reports in the latest update.

Entourage's stability was improved when waking from sleep. PowerPoint received general performance improvements.

Open XML File Format Converter

Microsoft's Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0 has been released. The converter allows users to convert files created in Office 2008 for Mac or its Windows counterpart.

According to Microsoft, the Open XML Converter can convert Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations that are in the Open XML Format so that you can open and edit the files in Office 2004 for Mac and Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files.

Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update

The Office 2004 update improves stability and compatibility with documents that were created in Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2007 for Windows. If the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is installed, this update enables Office 2004 for Mac to read and write Office documents that are in the Open XML Format.