Office:Mac 2008 12.2.1 available today

Today, we released Office:Mac 2008 12.2.1. This release fixes issues where some users were unable to open some of their XML-based files in PowerPoint:Mac and Excel:Mac.

This issue was accidentally introduced when we introduced stronger checking of our new XML-based file formats. In short, we were looking for a particular XML tag, and some files were either missing this tag or didn't have it in the form that we were expecting. Most users didn't see this issue, and for users who did see this issue, it usually wasn't affecting all of their files.

When we got the first reports of this issue, we were quickly able to figure out that it was this XML tag that had gone missing or wasn't in the expected format. Our next job was to figure out what had gone wrong so that we could fix that underlying issue.

We were able to figure out a few different instances where this was happening. Some cases were in our own code. For example, one instance in PowerPoint occurred when a user used a template that had been created as a .pot file in PowerPoint 2004 or earlier, edited and still saved in PowerPoint 2008 as a .pot, and then used to create a new .pptx file in PowerPoint 2008. Another instance in Excel occurred when an Office 2007 user created a .xlsx file from a .csv and then sent that file to an Excel 2008 user.

To install 12.2.1, first ensure that you have installed 12.2.0. For those of you who had files that you couldn't open and thus rolled back to 12.1.9, you must install SP2 first. Then you can install 12.2.1. Both of these updates are available on our knowledge base article for the update.

Concurrently, we also updated the Open XML File Format Converter. It's now at version 1.1.1. It had the same checks in it, so would have the same issues opening affected files. It's also available on our downloads page.

The English and Japanese versions of this update is live right now, and we're following with the other languages very soon.