This month, Microsoft’s infamous “Patch Tuesday” includes a patch for the Mac version of Office 2004.  For those unfamiliar with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, it an interesting exercise in bug squashing.  In the past, Microsoft had released security patches as needed.  The constant barrage of security patches became too much for already over burdened system administrators and they voiced their frustrations.  To find a middle ground, Microsoft chose the second Tuesday of each month to release its patches in bulk.

This month, Microsoft included the update to Office 2004 for the Mac.  This patch brings Office to version 11.2.4.  While the details of the specific vulnerabilities still remain undisclosed, here is a quote from Microsoft’s site: “This update fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2004 for Mac that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. This update also fixes issues in Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 and Entourage 2004, and it includes all of the improvements released in all previous Office 2004 updates.”

The patch is 57.5MB and can be found at this link.

Hopefully this patch will also improve on some of the stability issues I have seen with Office application running on Apple’s new Intel based hardware.