Microsoft Ships Mac Office 2004

On Wednesday, the Standard and Student and Teacher editions hit stores and online sellers. Both include updated versions of the Mac editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as the Entourage 2004 e-mail client and MSN Messenger 4.0.

The Professional version of the suite, however, won't appear until the second half of the year, said Microsoft. Professional is to contain a copy of Virtual PC for Mac 7, emulation software that allows Mac OS X-equipped systems to run Windows software.

Virtual PC 7 will be the first release of the emulator since Microsoft acquired the software from Connectix last year.

Among the new features in the 2004 edition of Office for the Macintosh are improved edit tracking within Word, support for file names longer than 31 characters, and a tighter integration between the suite's applications and Microsoft's instant messenger.

A free 30-day trial version of the suite can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site. Prices for the Standard and Student and Teacher editions are $399 and $149, respectively.

Japanese and English editions of Office 2004 are available now, while French, Italian, Swedish, German, and Spanish versions will ship in June.

*This story courtesy of Techweb.com.