Office 2004 for Mac

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac

Screenshot of Microsoft Word 2004 on an Intel-based Mac in Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" through Rosetta
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Initial release	May 11, 2004; 13 years ago (2004-05-11)
Stable release	v11.6.6 / December 13, 2011; 5 years ago (2011-12-13)
Development status	Unsupported as of 10 January 2012
License	Commercial proprietary software
Website	microsoft.com/mac/products

Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Mac OS X. The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer. For this reason, it is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.

Office 2004 was replaced by its successor, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which was developed as a universal binary to run natively on Intel Macs. However, Office 2008 did not include support for Visual Basic for Applications, which made Microsoft extend the support period by an additional 27 months for their older Office 2004. Microsoft ultimately shipped support for Visual Basic in Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, which also dropped PowerPC support altogether.

As of January 10, 2012, support for Office 2004 for Mac has ended: no further updates or support will be provided from Microsoft.

Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 is available in three editions: Standard, Professional, and Student and Teacher. All three editions include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. The Professional Edition adds Virtual PC. The Student and Teacher Edition cannot be upgraded, which means when a later version of Office is released, people who purchased the Student and Teacher edition must buy a new package.

Microsoft Word is a word processor which possesses a dominant market share in the word processor market. Its proprietary DOC format is considered a de facto standard, although its successive Windows version (Word 2007) uses a new XML-based format called .DOCX, but has the capability of saving and opening the old .DOC format.

The new Office Open XML format was built into the next version of Office for Mac (Office 2008). However, it is also supported on Office 2004 with the help of a free conversion tool available from Microsoft.