ANTenna Blog -- Apple

Microsoft Office 2004 users can now finally read and write Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents in the new Office Open XML file format. The new XML-based file format was introduced with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows, and Office 2004 users were out of luck reading documents in that format.

Microsoft promised that Office 2008 for Macintosh would natively read/write files in the new format, and it does. The company also promised that after Office 2008 was introduced, it would release a converter that offered native Office Open XML support for Office 2004 for the Macintosh. They've delivered that too. It's better than nothing, but it does not handle Office Open XML documents as well as Office 2008.

The new Open XML File Format Converter for Mac was in beta for a long time, and had many problems. Documents simply didn't convert properly.

Microsoft finally released the "version 1.0" converter a month ago. It's a 44MB download, which installs a whopping 184MB worth of files into your Office 2004 system. To use the converter, Microsoft says that you need to be running Office 2004 version 11.4 or later, but recommends that you have the Office 2004 version 11.5 update.

Having worked with the converter for a while now, I can tell you that it does a pretty good job with plain old Word documents, but messes up on complexly formatted documents. With Excel, it similarly supports simple spreadsheets, but can't handle complex ones with embedded or linked documents. PowerPoint... well, it's not pretty.

If you are running Office 2004 for Mac, and if the only problem that you've been having is in occasionally reading documents created by Office 2007/2008 users, this should fit the bill. I.e., there's no reason for you to upgrade to Office 2008.

However, if your company document standard is Office Open XML, you should definitely upgrade to Office 2008, and not rely upon the converter.

Microsoft warns that there are some issues with the converters. Some of them are pretty hairy. Be sure to check out Microsoft's support document before deciding if you should stick with Office 2004 and use the converters, or if you should bite the bullet and go for Office 2008.