Many Mac users have been frustrated over the last few months by an inability to open documents saved in Microsoft's new Open XML format (docx, xlsx and pptx files). At long last, however, the cavalry have arrived -- Microsoft has released their Open XML Converter package in finished form.

The converter installs quickly and, with the latest revision of Office 2004 installed, works transparently. You can use it to convert single documents on the fly, or to convert many documents at once. This saves the trouble of asking a document's sender to resave the file in an older format.

Full instructions are available via the ITS knowledge base.