Office 2004 for Mac

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac
Screenshot of Microsoft Word 2004 on an Intel-based Mac in Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" through Rosetta
Developer
Microsoft
Website	Office Mac Page
Releases
Release date	11 May 2004[citation needed]
Current version	v11.6.5 (September 13, 2011; 2 months ago (2011-09-13))[info]
License	Proprietary EULA
Support status
Supported through January 10th 2012

Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The software was originally written for the PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer.

Office 2004 was replaced by its successor, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which was written to run natively on Intel Macs. However, Office 2008 did not include support for Visual Basic for Applications, so Microsoft has extended support and updates for the older Office 2004 out to January 10, 2012.^[1] Microsoft ultimately shipped support for Visual Basic in Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac.

System requirements

Requirements listed for Office 2004:

• G3, Mac OS X compatible processor or higher
• Mac OS X 10.2.8 through 10.6.8, not compatible with 10.7 or later
• 256 MB RAM
• 450 MB available hard-disk space.

Editions

Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 is available in three editions; Standard, Professional and Student and Teacher. All three editions include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. The Professional Edition adds Virtual PC. The Student and Teacher Edition cannot be upgraded, which means when a later version of Office is released, people who purchased the Student and Teacher edition must buy a new package.

Features

Word 2004

Main article: Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor which possesses a dominant market share in the word processor market. Its proprietary DOC format is considered a de facto standard, although its most recent Windows version (Word 2007) uses a new XML-based format called .DOCX, but has the capability of saving and opening the old .DOC format.

The new Office Open XML format will be built into the next version of Office for Mac (Office 2008). However, it is also supported on Office 2004 with the help of a free conversion tool available from Microsoft.^[2]

Excel 2004

Main article: Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program. Like Microsoft Word, it possesses a dominant market share. It was originally a competitor to the dominant Lotus 1-2-3, but it eventually outsold it and became the de facto standard for spreadsheet programs.

Entourage 2004

Main article: Microsoft Entourage

Microsoft Entourage is an email application. Its personal information management features include a calendar, address book, task list, note list, and project manager. With Entourage 2004, Microsoft began offering a Project Center, which allows the user to create and organize projects. Information may come from within Entourage or outside the program.

PowerPoint 2004

Main article: Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular presentation program used to create slideshows composed of text, graphics, movies and other objects, which can be displayed on-screen and navigated through by the presenter or printed out on transparencies or slides. It too possesses a dominant market share. Movies, videos, sounds and music, as well as wordart and autoshapes can be added to slideshows.

Virtual PC

Main article: Microsoft Virtual PC

Included with Office 2004 for Mac Professional Edition, Microsoft Virtual PC is a virtualization application which emulates Microsoft Windows operating systems on Mac OS X which are PowerPC-based. Virtual PC does not work on Intel-based Macs and in August 2006, Microsoft announced it would not be ported to Intel-based Macintoshes, effectively discontinuing the product as PowerPC-based Macintoshes are no longer manufactured.

Criticism

Images inserted into any Office 2004 application by using either cut and paste or drag and drop result in a file that does not display the inserted graphic when viewed on a Windows machine. Instead, the Windows user is told "QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture". Geekboy presented one solution^[3] as far back as December 2004, and according to latest testing, this is still broken on Office 2008.

There is no support for editing right to left and bidirectional languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2004, making it impossible^{[citation needed]} in Word 2004 or Powerpoint 2004. This issue has not been fixed in Office 2008 or 2011 either.^[4][5]

See also

• List of office suites
• Comparison of office suites

References

1. ^ Tedesco, Mike (October 12, 2009). "Office 2004 Mainstream Support Has Been Extended". Microsoft Mactopia. http://www.officeformac.com/blog/Office-2004-Mainstream-Support-Has-Been-Extended. Retrieved October 12, 2009. 
2. ^ "Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.1.1". Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_AddTools&fid=DFD93FB0-1CF7-4835-892D-A74FAE8D2F30#viewer. Retrieved October 12, 2009. 
3. ^ Clark, Peter (December 6, 2004). "QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture.". Geek Boy's Blog. http://blog.pclark.net/2004/12/quicktime-and-tiff-lzw-decompressor.html. Retrieved October 12, 2009. ^{[dead link]}
4. ^ Heard, Chris (September 27, 2007). "It’s official: no RTL support in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac". Higgaion. http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/?p=774. Retrieved October 12, 2009. 
5. ^ Morgenstern, David (August 8, 2010). "Microsoft boosts languages, proofing tools in Office 2011 for Mac, Unicode right-to-left support missing". ZDNet. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/microsoft-boosts-languages-proofing-tools-in-office-2011-for-mac-unicode-right-to-left-support-missing/7876.