Tag: Security

Microsoft releases updates for Mac Office v.X and 2004 today. Microsoft pulled previous update citing that the patches were not thoroughly tested and not ready for deployment. Later, Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit clarified that there is nothing wrong with the patches.

From The Office for Mac Team Blog:

You can download them for Office 2004 and for Office v. X (and the Office 2004 updater should be available via Microsoft AutoUpdate as well). These updates can be applied whether or not you installed the pre-release updaters that were briefly available last week.

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Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.2 Update (12.19.2006)

This update contains several improvements for PowerPoint and Entourage.

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

Requirements:

• Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.0 Update is installed on your computer.
• Operating system: Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or a later version of Mac OS.

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Microsoft Office v. X for Mac Update (2006-12-19)

This update contains several improvements to enhance stability in PowerPoint.

Applies to: Office v. X, Microsoft Word X for Mac, Microsoft Excel X for Mac, Microsoft PowerPoint X for Mac, Microsoft Entourage X for Mac.Requirements:

• Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office v. X for Mac 10.1.8 Update is installed on your computer.
• Operating system: Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma) or a later version of Mac OS.

Microsoft posted and abruptly pulled the latest updates for Mac Office v. X and 2004 a few days ago. They even advised people who installed the updates to uninstall it. The problem is that there is no easy way to uninstall it. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to uninstall it.
Microsoft Mac Business Unit Team just clarified that there is no need to uninstall the updates.
http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/12/17/now-you-see-it-now-you-don-t.aspx

The MSRC team put up a notice on their blog. That post told users to uninstall the patch without giving clear guidance on how to do that. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to uninstall it without going back to the original CD and doing a clean install followed by applying the latest full updater. That’s a really poor user experience for those who installed the update, so the MacBU is working very quickly to rectify the situation. As it turns out, however, the code that went live has no known issues, so while we recalled it because it had not been thoroughly vetted, there’s no urgent need to uninstall the patch.

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If you really want to uninstall the patch (again, you do not need to do so), there are very complete instructions on the Word MVP site, or you can follow these abbreviated steps:

1. Move the Microsoft Office 2004 or X folder to the trash (make sure you keep any important templates or other documents you may have saved into this folder)
2. Empty the trash
3. Reboot your Mac to ensure that the Entourage Database Daemon is not running (or use unix commands to terminate the process from the Terminal)
4. Re-install Office from your original CD (drag-and-drop is fine)
5. Run Microsoft AutoUpdate to re-install the 11.3.0 update. (For Office X, you’ll need to download and install the 10.1.8 patch manually)

UPDATE (12.13.2006):
Microsoft has withdrawn the update, citing that the release of the update was accidental.
The official announcement from Microsoft regarding the accidental posting of the security updates.

Microsoft is advising those who had applied the update to uninstall them. The problem is that they didn’t specify the method to uninstall the updates.

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Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.1 Update
(December 12, 2006)

This update contains several updates 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.

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.0 Update is installed on your computer

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Microsoft Office v. X for Mac Security Update (2006-12-12)

This update contains several updates 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 v. X, Microsoft Word X for Mac, Microsoft Excel X for Mac, Microsoft PowerPoint X for Mac, Microsoft Entourage X for Mac.

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office v. X for Mac 10.1.8 Update is installed on your computer.