Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.1
Microsoft has released Office for Mac 2011 14.2.1, a redo of its recently released Service Pack 2 (see “Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.0,” 12 April 2012) that includes the same improvements and tweaks of that previous version. According to the Office for Mac blog, the 14.2.0 update was pulled because of “issues that affected a small percentage of users.” Many of those issues, centered largely on a variety of problems with Outlook as well as crashes with Word and Excel, are detailed on this forum at MacInTouch. For the time being, we recommend caution in applying this update. (Free update as a download or through Microsoft AutoUpdate, 110 MB, release notes)
Thanks for another excellent heads up.
But I've got antecedent confusion: what is the antecedent of "this" in the following sentence? "For the time being, we recommend caution in applying this update." Which update is the caution about, 14.2.0, or 14.2.1?
Well, that's a good question. If you haven't yet updated to 14.2.0, I would definitely recommend against it for a while longer, to see if Microsoft releases a 14.2.2, since it seems that 14.2.1 doesn't necessarily address all the issues. But if you've already upgraded to 14.2.0, it's probably worth upgrading to 14.2.1 as well, but cautiously, as in making sure you can revert if something else goes wrong.
Thanks, Mr. Engst.
I did upgrade to 14.2.0, so I'll go ahead & do 14.2.1., but cautiously, as you advise.
Thanks again. I always appreciate you and TidBITS looking out for us!
I've upgraded to 14.2.1 with no additional problems in Word or Excel. But there's a BIG problem in Word that Microsoft is ignoring. It is impossible to make a PDF from a Word document on the Mac that preserves hyperlinks, table-of-contents links, and clickable references in a document. Apparently this works in the Windows version of Word, so why not on the Mac? Seems to me this is a must-have feature for anyone who uses Word to make PDF documents. Any thoughts?
Alas, this is nothing new - the Mac version has long lagged behind the Windows version in this regard. Microsoft says that it's because they actually rely on Acrobat for Windows to do some of this, and Acrobat on Mac doesn't have the same capabilities. Regardless of the finger-pointing, the only way to get a fully linked PDF out of Word is to use Windows (we did this for Take Control for many years before switching entirely to Pages, which lacks PDF bookmarks entirely, but does do PDF links more or less properly - for bookmarks, we use Aerialist Pro in Acrobat).
Thanks, Adam. I've been trying to avoid having to use Windows Word. Sigh...
I often must create PDFs from Word 2011 docs. When I need to retain working hyperlinks, I open the Word doc in Apache's "OpenOffice.org 3," then create PDFs from there by using its built-in "Export Directly as PDF" button.
This work-around "translation," while not 100% ideal, is rather adequate. Links always work, and the only formatting issues I've found that tend to need tweaking are Word Art creations for banners & text boxes.
"OpenOffice.org 3" and "OpenOffice.org for Mac OSX" are available here: http://www.openoffice.org/news/aoo34.html
That's good to know, Stan! Does OpenOffice do both internal PDF links and automatically created bookmarks to match the heading styles?