Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac
Developer	Microsoft
Type	Office suite
Announced	January 6, 2004
Release date	May 19, 2004
Discontinued	January 10, 2012
Latest release version	11.6.6 December 13, 2011
Operating system	Mac OS X
Licensing	Commercial proprietary software
Preceded by	Microsoft Office v. X (2001)
Succeeded by	Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac (2008)

Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office that was developed by Microsoft for Mac OS X. It was announced on January 6, 2004 and released on May 19, 2004. It is equivalent to Office 2003 for Windows. The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer. For this reason, it is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.

Office 2004 was replaced by its successor, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which was developed as a universal binary to run natively on Intel Macs. However, Office 2008 did not include support for Visual Basic for Applications, which made Microsoft extend the support period by an additional 27 months for their older Office 2004. Microsoft ultimately shipped support for Visual Basic in Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, which also dropped PowerPC support altogether.

As of January 10, 2012, support for Office 2004 for Mac has ended: no further updates or support will be provided from Microsoft.

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, which was delayed until Fall 2004. The Student and Teacher Edition was available at a lower price for educational customers, but are not eligible for future upgrades.

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 successive 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 was 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.

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 hypervisor 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.

System requirements

• PowerPC G3 or higher processor.
• Mac OS X 10.2.8 to 10.5.8 (up to 10.6.8 with Rosetta).
• 256 MB of RAM.
• 450 MB of available drive space.
• CD-ROM drive or network connection for installation.
• 1024 x 768 or larger display with support for 16-bit color.

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". Peter Clark of Geek Boy's Blog presented one solution in December 2004. However, this issue persists in Office 2008.

There is no support for editing right to left and bidirectional languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2004. This issue has not been fixed in Office 2008 or 2011 either.

External links

• Office 2004 for Mac at Microsoft (archived 2004-06-07)
• Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac at Wikipedia