However, Office 2008 did not include support for Visual Basic for Applications, which made Microsoft extend the support period of Office 2004 from Octoto January 10, 2012. Office 2004 was replaced by its successor, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which was developed as a universal binary to run natively on Intel Macs. For this reason, it is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.

The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer.

It is equivalent to Office 2003 for Windows. Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Mac OS X.