Brief Hands-On Report--Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.4 Update

Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.4 Update. According to Microsoft,

This update contains several improvements to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code.

Applies to: Office 2004 Standard Edition, Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition, Office 2004 Professional Edition, Word 2004, Excel 2004, PowerPoint 2004, Entourage 2004.

Since the 11.3.4 Update is not a combo updater, Microsoft warns that before installing this update, one should make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.3 Update has been installed on your computer. To verify that this update has been installed, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk and then in the File menu, click Get Info to check the version number.

The improvements for all Office 2004 applications are:

Security is improved--This update fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2004 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code.

The improvements for Entourage 2004 are:

Junk e-mail filter list is updated--This update provides the Junk E-mail Filter in Microsoft Entourage 2004 for Mac with a more current definition of which e-mail messages are considered junk e-mail.

The updated files are:

Junk E-mail Protection to 11.3.4
Microsoft Component Plugin to 11.3.4
Microsoft Word to 11.3.4

We downloaded the 11.3.4 updater and installed it over the copy of Office 2004 on our MacBook Pro C2D with no problems. We briefly tried launching each application and opening and modifying several files each for Word, Excel and PowerPoint without encountering a problem. We launched Entourage but did not use it for email. No major problems popped up for us. [Bill Fox]