Mac Office, Messenger Updated

Showing its continuing commitment to the Macintosh, Microsoft has made available updates to two of its Macintosh products—Office X and MSN Messenger—although in both cases the Macintosh version lags behind the comparable Windows product. Besides bug fixes, the Office update reintroduces certain database features that were available in previous versions of Excel for the Macintosh, but not in the initial OS X release. The new release of MSN Messenger for Mac OS X is comparable with MSN Messenger for Windows 2000 and 9x but lacks some messaging capabilities found in the newer Windows Messenger client in Windows XP.

Office Update Improves Database Interoperability

Service Release 1 (SR1) of Office for Mac OS X includes support for the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) API, which allows Excel worksheets to include data retrieved from a variety of databases, such as Oracle or SQL Server. Although versions of Excel for the previous Macintosh operating system allowed Mac users to access databases via ODBC (with a third-party ODBC driver), Microsoft did not convert this feature for the initial release for Mac OS X. This meant that spreadsheets created with the Windows version or previous Mac versions of Excel, and which relied upon ODBC, could not be used with Office X.