Microsoft To Reissue Scratched Mac Office Update

Microsoft's Mac development group will release a nonsecurity update for Office X and Office 2004 by the end of the week, and urged users who had installed an inadvertently posted bug fix last week to download the new update.

"Customers who downloaded the pre-release security update for Office for Mac on Tuesday should install this new update when it is released," said Mike Reavy, program manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center, on the team's blog. "This new update will remove the pre-release version and install the fully tested application fixes; we suggest that all Office for Mac users download the new update."

Last week, Microsoft posted an update that included both stability and security patches, but quickly yanked the fixes, saying then that the security section of the update wasn't ready to release. At the time, Microsoft told users to uninstall the update.

"Unfortunately, there's no easy way to uninstall it without going back to the original [Office] CD and doing a clean install followed by applying the latest full updater," wrote Erik Schwiebert, a Microsoft developer on the Mac Office blog. "That's a really poor user experience."

Users can safely wait until the update debuts, added Schwiebert, because the security patch "has no known issues, so while we recalled it because it hadn't been thoroughly vetted, there's no urgent need to uninstall."

Schwiebert also said that the security fix, which won't be included in the stability update deployed later this week, wasn't for the Microsoft Word zero-day vulnerability disclosed earlier this month.

The revised update will be available via Office's built-in auto updater and as a download from MacTopia.