Microsoft released Office 14.3.0 yesterday. Its release notes indicate the following changes:

  • Meeting invitation times are displayed inaccurately in Outlook for Mac
  • Fixes an issue that causes meeting invitation times from non-Exchange calendar servers to be off by one hour during certain times of the year.
  • Slides in collapsed sections cover other slides in Slide Sorter view in PowerPoint for Mac
  • Fixes a display issue that involves collapsed sections in Slide Sorter view.
  • Hash tags (#) in hyperlinks aren’t saved correctly in PowerPoint for Mac
  • Fixes an issue in which hyperlinks that contain hash tags (#) aren’t saved correctly.
  • Crash occurs when you use Paste Special with a partial table in PowerPoint for Mac
  • Fixes an issue that causes PowerPoint to crash when you use the Paste Special option to copy and paste part of a table.
  • RTF text that’s saved in PowerPoint for Windows can’t be pasted into PowerPoint for Mac
  • Fixes an issue in which RTF text that’s saved in PowerPoint for Windows can’t be copied and pasted into PowerPoint for Mac.

There is another undocumented, very important change: a different opening welcome screen that removes the 30-day trial and ties it to Office 365. Here’s the original screen:

Here’s the new screen:

BTW, fuck you

If you click “Try Office 365,” you have to create a Live account, then sign up for a trial that requires a credit card number and will start billing you at the end of the cycle. It’s like Video Professor: Microsoft Edition. “Free trial… wink wink.” The link at the bottom also means what it says: you can view files but don’t think about Saving them.

In my case, a corporate user needed to use the trial until a license could be purchased. Even when we tried to sign up for Office 365’s trial, creating the Live/Outlook.com account required us replying to an email verification that was blocked by the user’s corporate firewall. I was forced to uninstall, reinstall, repatch manually. Wasted time and I felt dumb because I was caught off guard, though the user was very nice and patient.

In other words, if you need to use a trial of Office, do not update past 14.2.5. Install 14.1.0 through Autoupdate, then manually install 14.2.5. This is odd because it’s things like this that discourage users from immediately installing updates that, more often than not, are in their best interest.

Be careful!