Excel poses for its close-up at Macworld

Microsoft has released the 11.5.7 update to its Office suite, aimed at the users of Office 2004. You should download this update to protect your Mac from being hacked by compromised Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Even the Mac has security flaws, but more common are the hacker entry points through things like Office or Adobe’s Flash. (If you aren’t up to date on the Microsoft security releases, 11.5.7 won’t load up. You can check your status in the Updater Logs folder inside your Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Microsoft also has prior updates available for download, to catch you up.)

Microsoft was one of the few big-name vendors at this year’s Macworld Expo, but it didn’t have new software to roll out this month in conjunction with its show appearance. The Redmond Giant was talking up the forthcoming release of Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. (Talking only, since no demos were presented at the Microsoft booth.) Outlook will be a replacement for Entourage, which still has advocates within the Mac expert community. One advantage of Entourage, noted in a Macworld panel, is its smooth interface with Microsoft Exchange servers, operated at countless companies who handle their own e-mail. Outlook will be inside the Office 2011 suite, and it’s not yet clear if it will be sold standalone. Entourage never was.

Those differences between Entourage and Outlook might have protected the Mac from some Microsoft-based exploits, however. Outlook has such a weak security reputation that it’s called Lookout by the PC community — at least those who’ve been infected by a mail message that wormed its way into the Windows environment on office PCs. Microsoft has closed these holes repeatedly on the PCs, but the tight link between Explorer and Windows remains a point of attack. No such link exists on the Macs.

It appears that Apple isn’t the only vendor who’s chosen an ill-advised name for a recent product though. (iPad will need some extra oomph to sell.) Microsoft will call its new generation of mail program Outlook, “which you’d think was one of the more bankrupt names” in the computer world, according to one panelist on the e-mail client showdown session at Macworld 2010. It’s important to Mac-PC offices that the two products exchange messages easily, to enable switchers as well as interoffice mail using the .PST message format.

Many years ago, however, the companies felt like they needed one another. When the business user was choosing personal computers for the first time — and PC didn’t automatically mean Microsoft-based, Intel-driven computers, Apple and Microsoft engaged in a public lovefest.

With the weekend’s amore still in the air, we offer this sentimental look at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dating in public. Both their companies seemed like eligible bachelors back then, rather than the lifelong mates they’ve become for Mac business users.

Jobs and Gates in 1983

Bill loves Steve, and Steve loves Bill in 1983

By now the business user can have the intimate relationship these two boys swooned over more than a quarter-century ago. Fusion from VMWare as well as Parallels both provide a Windows sandbox to use the tools of the “PC,” as the world has come to call the Wintel systems. Can’t you just feel the love? If nothing else, Fusion and Parallels give the Mac user a way to run Microsoft’s Explorer and see just how awful the Microsoft browser is rendering Web pages for Windows users.