Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a version of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

developed for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

. It is equivalent to Office 2003 for Windows. The software was originally written for

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's

Rosetta Rosetta or Rashid (; ar, رشيد ' ; french: Rosette ; cop, ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ ''ti-Rashit'', Ancient Greek: Βολβιτίνη ''Bolbitinē'') is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The R ...

emulation layer. For this reason, it is not compatible with

Mac OS X 10.7 OS X Lion, also known as Mac OS X Lion, (version 10.7) is the eighth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. A preview of OS X 10.7 Lion was publicly shown at the "Back to the Mac" Apple Speci ...

and newer. Office 2004 was replaced by its successor,

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for Mac OS X. It supersedes Office 2004 for Mac (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of Office 2007. Office 2008 was develop ...

, which was developed as a

universal binary The universal binary format is, in Apple parlance, a format for executable files that run natively on either PowerPC or Intel-manufactured IA-32 or Intel 64 or ARM64-based Macintosh computers. The format originated on NeXTStep as " Multi ...

to run natively on Intel Macs. However, Office 2008 did not include support for

Visual Basic for Applications Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no longer support ...

, which made Microsoft extend the support period of Office 2004 from October 13, 2009 to January 10, 2012. Microsoft ultimately shipped support for Visual Basic in

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for macOS. It is the successor to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and is comparable to Office 2010 for Windows. Office 2011 was followed by Microsoft Office 201 ...

, which also dropped PowerPC support altogether. Support for Office 2004 ended January 10, 2012.

Editions

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 includes

Virtual PC Windows Virtual PC (successor to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, and Connectix Virtual PC) is a Hardware virtualization, virtualization program for Microsoft Windows. In July 2006, Microsoft released the Windows version f ...

. The Student and Teacher Edition is not eligible for upgrade, which means if a later version of Office is installed, a full package license will be required.

Features

Word 2004

Microsoft Word is a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

which possesses a dominant market share in the word processor market. Its proprietary DOC format is considered a ''

de facto ''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with '' de jure'' ("by l ...

'' 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 Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a ZIP (file format), zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized th ...

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.

Excel 2004

Microsoft Excel is a

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ...

program. Like Microsoft Word, it possesses a dominant market share. It was originally a competitor to the dominant

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...

, but it eventually outsold it and became the ''de facto'' standard for spreadsheet programs.

Entourage 2004

Microsoft Entourage is an email application. Its personal information management features include a

calendar A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a phy ...

address book An address book or a name and address book is a book, or a database used for storing entries called contacts. Each contact entry usually consists of a few standard fields (for example: first name, last name, company name, address, telephone n ...

task list Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. It involves of various demands upon a person relating to work, ...

, note list, and project manager. With Entourage 2004, Microsoft began offering a Project Center, which allows the user to create and organize projects. Information may come from within Entourage or outside the program.

PowerPoint 2004

Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular

presentation program A computing, a presentation program (also called presentation software) is a software package used to display information in the form of a slide show. It has three major functions: * an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted * a ...

used to create slideshows composed of text, graphics, movies and other objects, which can be displayed on-screen and navigated through by the presenter or printed out on

transparencies A transparency, also known variously as a viewfoil, foil, or viewgraph, is a thin sheet of transparent flexible material, typically polyester (historically cellulose acetate), onto which figures can be drawn. These are then placed on an overhea ...

or slides. It too possesses a dominant market share. Movies, videos, sounds and music, as well as wordart and autoshapes can be added to slideshows.

Virtual PC

Included with Office 2004 for Mac Professional Edition, Microsoft Virtual PC is a

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

which emulates

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s on

which are

-based. Virtual PC does not work on Intel-based Macs and in August 2006, Microsoft announced it would not be ported to Intel-based Macintoshes, effectively discontinuing the product.

Limitations

Office for Mac 2004 has a number of limitations compared to Office 2003 for Windows. Images inserted into any Office 2004 application by using either cut and paste or drag and drop result in a file that does not display the inserted graphic when viewed on a Windows machine. Instead, the Windows user is told "QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture". Peter Clark of ''Geek Boy's Blog'' presented one solution in December 2004. However, this issue persists in Office 2008. There is no support for editing right to left and bidirectional languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2004. This issue has not been fixed in Office 2008 or 2011 either. Also, Office for Mac 2004 has a shorter lifecycle than Office 2003. Support for Office for Mac 2004 ended on January 10, 2012. As

software, it will not run on OS X Lion or any later versions of

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Office 2004 For Mac Microsoft Office MacOS-only software 2004 software