Microsoft Office 2004: Preliminary reports; Word 2004 incompatible with EndNote; Virtual PC delayed

Preliminary reports Although few people have actually received their copies of Office 2004 yet, we've begun to receive reports from those who have, largely positive. For example, Ernie Cooper writes:

"I installed Office 2004 yesterday on a G4 iMac running 10.3.3 without a hitch. All my Entourage data was correctly transferred and the whole package runs perfectly."

Word 2004 incompatible with EndNote We've received several reports from readers that EndNote, the bibliography software that integrates with Microsoft Word, is incompatible with Microsoft Word 2004. Alex Grothey writes:

"After manually installing the appropriate files in the Office folder, the EndNote menu appears in Word including the task bar, but they don't work. I assume that an update for EndNote is required (noting mentioned on their web page yet)."

After experiencing similar problems, MacFixIt reader Josh Turse contacted ISI ResearchSoft, the makers of EndNote, and received the following response:

"We currently have not made any compatibility announcements about word 2004, and do not support installing the tools into Word 2004 at this point. It is certainly possible they do not work at this point."

Virtual PC 7 delayed According to a Mac Observer story, Virtual PC 7, originally announced as part of Microsoft Office 2004, will not be available until "the second half of 2004." (Users began receiving copies of Office 2004 "Standard Edition" last week; a "Professional Edition" was to include Virtual PC 7.) According to a Microsoft Product Manager quoted in the article, "The developing, testing, and bug fix cycle with Virtual PC is longer than that of Office and the testing more vigorous than previous versions of Virtual PC. Because of this, we have adjusted our release timing to match a more realistic schedule."

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