As it tries to finish the next version of Office for the Mac, Microsoft has delayed efforts to enable current users of the productivity software to work with the new file formats used in the latest Windows version of the desktop software.
Microsoft now says a plug-in that will allow Office 2004 to fully work with the new formats won't be ready until six to eight weeks after the Office 2008 for Mac software suite ships, sometime in the second half of this year. Instead, the company is offering a separate downloadable converter program, starting Tuesday, designed to enable Office for Mac users to convert Word 2007's .docx files to the Rich Text Format, or RTF, which can be read by all Mac OS X versions of Office.
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