Brief Hands-On Report--Microsoft's Mac BU released Revised Patch for Office 2004 for Mac (11.3.2)

Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) released a revised patch for Office 2004 ahead of schedule (late in week). The patch (11.3.2) is available for download via the Microsoft AutoUpdate application, the "Check for updates" menu item of any Office 2004 application or as a stand-alone file from this Microsoft Web page.

Last week an errant patch was released and quickly pulled. The Mac BU promised a revised update that would remove the errant update (11.3.1) and reinstall the stability fixes. The Mac BU has done so already. According to the ReadMe file,

This update contains several improvements for PowerPoint and Entourage.

The details of the improvements are:

3.1 Improvements for PowerPoint 2004

3.1.1 Stability is improved
This update fixes an issue that causes PowerPoint to quit unexpectedly when you open a presentation.

3.2 Improvements for Entourage 2004

3.2.1 Contact names that contain special characters are handled correctly
This update fixes an issue that causes meeting requests to display incorrectly when sent to contacts with names that contain single quotation marks ('), double quotation marks ("), and parentheses.

3.2.2 Public folder messages are not duplicated
This update fixes an issue that causes duplicate messages to appear in public folders.

3.2.3 Compatibility with Mirapoint Message Server™ is improved
This update fixes an issue that causes Entourage to quit unexpectedly when accessing mail folders on a Mirapoint Message Server.

The updated files are:

Database Utility 11.3.2
Microsoft Component Plugin 11.3.2
Microsoft Database Daemon 11.3.2
Microsoft Entourage 11.3.2
Microsoft Framework 11.3.2
Microsoft OLE 11.3.2
Microsoft PowerPoint 11.3.2

These are the same files that were updated by errant updater 11.3.1.

We updated Office 2004 on our Macs using AutoUpdate. They included Macs that had been updated with the errant patch 11.3.1 and those that hadn't. All Macs and backup FireWire drives took the patch with no trouble. In several hours use, no Office 2004 for Mac application has had an issue following the update. [Bill Fox]