Microsoft today announced that it will extend Mainstream Support for Office 2004 for Mac through January 10th, 2012. The company had previously announced that support would end on October 13th, 2009, but in light of the significant number of users still using Office 2004 in order to take advantage of Visual Basic features missing in Office 2008, Microsoft has decided to extend support for Office 2004 well beyond Office 2010's launch planned for late 2010 that will bring back Visual Basic features to the company's Office suite on the Mac platform.
While most customers have upgraded to Office 2008 for Mac, some have remained on Office 2004 in order to take advantage of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is supported in Office 2004, but did not make it into Office 2008. Today I am happy to share that we have extended the Mainstream Support date for Office 2004, originally scheduled to end October 13, 2009, through January 10, 2012.
The date has been extended to 2012 specifically to ensure continuous cross-platform compatibility for Office 2004 customers reliant on VBA until support for VBA is released in the next version of Office for Mac.