Office:Mac 2008 12.2.1 available today

Today, we released Office:Mac 2008 12.2.1. This release fixes issues where some users were unable to open some of their XML-based files in PowerPoint:Mac and Excel:Mac.

This issue was accidentally introduced when we introduced stronger checking of our new XML-based file formats. In short, we were looking for a particular XML tag, and some files were either missing this tag or didn't have it in the form that we were expecting. Most users didn't see this issue, and for users who did see this issue, it usually wasn't affecting all of their files.

When we got the first reports of this issue, we were quickly able to figure out that it was this XML tag that had gone missing or wasn't in the expected format. Our next job was to figure out what had gone wrong so that we could fix that underlying issue.

We were able to figure out a few different instances where this was happening. Some cases were in our own code. For example, one instance in PowerPoint occurred when a user used a template that had been created as a .pot file in PowerPoint 2004 or earlier, edited and still saved in PowerPoint 2008 as a .pot, and then used to create a new .pptx file in PowerPoint 2008. Another instance in Excel occurred when an Office 2007 user created a .xlsx file from a .csv and then sent that file to an Excel 2008 user.

To install 12.2.1, first ensure that you have installed 12.2.0. For those of you who had files that you couldn't open and thus rolled back to 12.1.9, you must install SP2 first. Then you can install 12.2.1. Both of these updates are available on our knowledge base article for the update.

Concurrently, we also updated the Open XML File Format Converter. It's now at version 1.1.1. It had the same checks in it, so would have the same issues opening affected files. It's also available on our downloads page.

The English and Japanese versions of this update is live right now, and we're following with the other languages very soon.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2009
  Waiting for a 12.2.1 that can be installed directly from SP1 (12.1.x, 12.1.9) in Italian, because Italian version 12.2.0 is no longer available for download. ;-) Also looking forward to hearing the mysterious MacBu conference or announcement for the Mac platform on August 13th. :-)

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2009
  Oh, I should have mentioned that!  The English version is available today, the other language versions will be following very shortly.  That includes making 12.2.0 available to our Italian users again, of course. We do have a super-secret announcement coming next Thursday.  I'll post more here once I'm allowed to.  I'm very very excited about it and can't wait to be able to talk about it. :D

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2009
  Glad to see the update. What about the support of vb macros? Any chances we see it before next version of office mac? It is a huge pain on a daily basis. Thanks

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2009
  Frederic - As we announced last year, VBA will return to the next version of Office:Mac.  Getting VBA up and running on Intel Macs is a huge chunk of work, and not something that we could contain in service pack.  You can read the technical details behind this in the following blog post from one of our senior developers: http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/05/13/saying-hello-again-to-visual-basic/

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2009
  We released updates for each language as they came available, instead of waiting to release them all at once.  We usually do release all languages simultaneously.  However, since this update is so important to the users who were impacted by the problem, we decided that holding up all language updates until all of the languages were completed wasn't the right course of action. We made a mistake that prevented some users from opening some files.  We fixed it as soon as we could, and we made that fix available to users as soon as possible.  

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2009
  Canadian firm i4i won a sentence, Microsoft must stop selling Office 2003 and 2007 because these include .docx (XML, etcetera) format, a patent by i4i. Now what? How will Microsoft eliminate the .docx format since they wanted to convince users to switch to it? ;-) OK, use .ODT open document in Office 2010 as standard, but how about the many people starting using .docx in the meanwhile???? Everybody back to .doc or convert all files perfectly at saving time, from .docx to .ODT? That's a big trouble, I think... Probably the best is propose to convert every .docx to .odt (better if it is perfect, nowadays it is not...) or .doc when file is opened and saved. Or also a batch conversion when Word is started... Or continuing to pay i4i. Time will tell. Office 2008 should have the same issue. http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/08-11-2009/0005076007&EDATE=

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2009
  I'm on the technical team, so I don't know anything about it.  Legal matters are far outside my purview of user experience. :)  

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2009
  OneNote 2008??!!?!  Any update on OneNote Mac port?

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2009
  I've got nothing to share about that just now.

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2009
  Hello. Just out of curiosity, why doesn't Office 2008 (12.2.1) save as .odt like Office 2007 (SP2)?

• Anonymous
  August 20, 2009
  Office: Mac is a separate product with a separate code base.  Right now, the majority of our user feedback indicates that our users value reliable cross-platform compatibility with the binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) and with Open XML (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc).  Feedback from our users helps us determine our future roadmap, so if .odt support is important to you, make sure that you submit feedback to tell us why it's important to you.  You can submit feedback here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/suggestions.mspx