[alejandroramirez]

Thank you for your patience to those of you experiencing issues updating to Office 12.1.1. Here are some suggestions:

1) Did you download the correct language update for your Office 2008 installation (unless you are using AutoUpdate which detects the correct language).

2) Is your "Microsoft Office 2008" folder installed in the boot partition and Applications folder? If you have moved it, please place it back to its original location.

3) Have you renamed the Microsoft Office 2008 folder? If yes, please change the name back to its original form.

4) If you have modified in any way the files inside the Microsoft Office 2008 installation this could prevent the update from succeeding. If you have, please remove office (you can use the Remove Office tool) and reinstall the product from your original media. After updating to SP1 it is recommended that you restart your machine.

5) Have you performed other updates to Office 2008 prior to the 12.1.1. update (i.e. 12.1 SP1)? If yes, I would advice to restart your computer and try again.

I will continue to monitor other users posts and hope that these suggestions help you.

Alejandro Ramirez
Microsoft Mac BU

[Kiminao]

Does anyone else find it absolutely absurd that the OpenXML Converter requires 188MB of disc space? 188MB?! For a file converter? I remember when MS released the Word 6 Converter to allow Word 5.1A to read Word 6 files... that was, what, 100KB? This one is more than 1000 times the size!
Ah, MS... truly thy code doth suck.

[mdawson]

MacPCJustCreate said:

"When will we see VBA restored to Word 2008?"

I say WHEN IS WINDOWS OFFICE FEATURE PARITY VBA COMING TO MAC OFFICE?:0

>

Quote

Also when is Microsoft going to take all the NO Ops out of the code so it can run faster?]:) I guess that it is too much to ask that Mac Office run as fast as Office on Windows - Oh Well.X-(

Exactly. Even pre-2008, VBA support on the Mac has been poor. I can understand not having things like ActiveX commands and other Windows-specific commands and functions not working in the Mac version of Office?those technologies are not supported in OS X?, but far more neutral features break in the Mac version of OS X. I have countless programmed workbooks that do not work on my home computer because they include things like enumerated types (standard in nearly all high-level languages), platform agnostic functions (e.g,. InStrRev is not implemented in VBA:mac), file access commands that are modeled specifically to the OS, etc.

The level of VBA feature parity on the Mac is less than poor and severely limits cross-platform coding. Don?t even get me started on the helpful features included in the VBA IDE since at least Office 2000/XP that make coding easier, but that were never implemented in Office:mac.

Office:mac not running as fast as Office for Windows. Unless someone has a ginormous workbook with several worksheets filled to the hilt with data and formulas or an extremely large document containing several OLE objects and images, any given Microsoft Office application should fly through any given document on any computer sold in the past 3 to 5 years. It is intolerable how Excel in particular can slow to crawl once a few formulas are incorporated into a workbook. I work with relatively small data sets in Excel, so I would hate to imagine how long it takes for a person that has spreadsheets that contain thousands of rows, tens of columns and numerous sheets to get anything done.

Computer performance has increased by orders of magnitude in the ten years since I first started using Excel on a regular basis, yet Excel's performance level is stuck in the late 1990s. Word also has its hangups, particularly once a few charts and tables are linked from Excel; the use of a few OLE objects can slow Word to a crawl on the Mac.

[sdaniela]

Thanks for the advice, but all those things check out OK for me, but I still can't install the update on two different Macs. Both say the same thing: a copy of the program can't be found, even though it's there. I could install the 12.1 update a few weeks back without a problem. What's different about 12.1.1??? This is frustrating.

[Jeter2Fan93]

So with this update for Office 2004, was it Microsoft falling under pressure from the open source community and their ability to add support for the Office 2007/2008 format to Open Office or NeoOffice? Seriously, I was not expecting to see support for their XML format in Office 2004, so this was a pleasant surprise. And another pleasant surprise is that it actually works! At least, for the small but decent sized files that I was testing.

Now, regarding the Office 2008 update. For those that installed this successfully, does this prompt you with the registration screen again? I ask because it's embarrassing to be at work and have this come up after an update and your boss is right behind you. The bad part? I had the Office box in front of me with the same code on the box as what I entered in the first place. I don't want to go in tomorrow and have this same problem.

[ellen]

Updating a non english version of MS Office 2004…

- it is indeed a combo update, I have two Macs one of them with all previous updates and another one with no updates whatsoever, Office Update 11.5.0 ran and installed fine on both of them.

- at this point it didn't open a Word 2008 docx I had created with needless to say Word Office 2008:mac

- once installed the Open XML Converter, it did open it.



I guess that is the expected behaviour, but then the readme for the 11.5.0 update is kind of confusing, the user may have downloaded just the 11.5.0 update -it is big enough- and know iota about the Open XML Converter.

[whitedog]

{quote}I will continue to monitor other users posts and hope that these suggestions help you.
Alejandro Ramirez
Microsoft Mac BU{quote}

Well, that's good news, of a sort. The Mac BU is following forum feedback on the latest batch of Office updates.

I have both Office 2004 and '08 on my Mac Pro. The updates (downloaded through Version Tracker) went OK. And I tested the XML converter with a simple Word '08 text file, opening it in Word '04. This worked, too. Of course, it will be awhile before we know how well it works on more complex documents. I'll leave that to trickier heads than mine to figure out.

In the meantime, the big question for Mr. Ramirez is, when is Microsoft going to provide feature parity for the Mac version of Office? This includes, but is not limited to, VBA. As long as MS treats their Mac customers like second-class citizens, they will continue to get very little respect in the Mac community. What excuses like those they proffered for not including VBA in Office '08 tell us is that the powers that be at Microsoft are unwilling to provide the Mac BU with the resources they need to bring Office for Mac up to par. I realize the folks at the Mac BU cannot admit this publicly; nevertheless, they should understand their lame explanations don't cut it and only serve to insult our intelligence. If a much smaller company like Adobe can make co-equal versions of their flagship applications for Mac and Windows, it's simply not credible that Microsoft cannot do the same.

[Jeter2Fan93]

whitedog said:

{quote}I will continue to monitor other users posts and hope that these suggestions help you.
Alejandro Ramirez
Microsoft Mac BU{quote}

Well, that's good news, of a sort. The Mac BU is following forum feedback on the latest batch of Office updates.

I have both Office 2004 and '08 on my Mac Pro. The updates (downloaded through Version Tracker) went OK. And I tested the XML converter with a simple Word '08 text file, opening it in Word '04. This worked, too. Of course, it will be awhile before we know how well it works on more complex documents. I'll leave that to trickier heads than mine to figure out.

In the meantime, the big question for Mr. Ramirez is, when is Microsoft going to provide feature parity for the Mac version of Office? This includes, but is not limited to, VBA. As long as MS treats their Mac customers like second-class citizens, they will continue to get very little respect in the Mac community. What excuses like those they proffered for not including VBA in Office '08 tell us is that the powers that be at Microsoft are unwilling to provide the Mac BU with the resources they need to bring Office for Mac up to par. I realize the folks at the Mac BU cannot admit this publicly; nevertheless, they should understand their lame explanations don't cut it and only serve to insult our intelligence. If a much smaller company like Adobe can make co-equal versions of their flagship applications for Mac and Windows, it's simply not credible that Microsoft cannot do the same.

In case you missed their blog article, here it is: http://officeformac....e-of-the-future

[charlieartist]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't MSFT want to ditch VBA (on all platforms) in order to move to upgraded technologies? I had also seen some talk online about retrenching on this stance, but I can't blame them. After all, Apple took that risk when moving from OS 9 to OS X.

[rwmoore]

1) Did you download the correct language update for your Office 2008 installation (unless you are using AutoUpdate which detects the correct language).

Yes.

2) Is your "Microsoft Office 2008" folder installed in the boot partition and Applications folder?

Yes.

3) Have you renamed the Microsoft Office 2008 folder?

No.

4) If you have modified in any way the files inside the Microsoft Office 2008 installation this could prevent the update from succeeding.

I have not.

5) Have you performed other updates to Office 2008 prior to the 12.1.1. update (i.e. 12.1 SP1)?

I installed 12.1.0 Service Pack 1.

I have restarted multiple times, tried downloading manually, etc. and I continue to get the same error listed previously here, "You cannot install Office 2008 12.1.1 Update on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume." I have a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, 2GB Ram, Running 10.5.3 (up to date). This is a fairly new install of Office 2008 (less than 3 weeks).

[jrusso2003]

Alejandro, I tried your suggestions. I had installed 2008 per instructions to begin with and have done nothing to the file since. I installed SP1 w/o problems. I restarted, but 12.1.1 still refused to let me install (red exclamation point). What should I do?
Joe Russo
joe.russo@mac.com

[frail]

This seems to happen to me after I have used a third-party program to remove localized files that I do not use. On a fresh install of Office 2008, updates are fine. After removing localized files using Macaroni I cannot apply any updates to Office 2008. Same problem with the auto updater and the manual patch. From reading elsewhere it seems that stripping Office 2008 of localized files or PPC code causes the updater to not find the install. I've been deleting localized files for quite some time and it is only Office that can't seem to update itself when this happens. Applying said updates should be much less cumbersome than having to remove Office and reinstall. I'm getting tired of being punished by Microsoft for removing localized files that I don't need.

For reference: forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=505414&page=3