Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 Update

So it turns out that Microsoft’s latest patch for Office 2008 refuses to install if you’ve used a program such as Monolingual to strip out some of the bloat…

The installer performs some kind of checksum on the files and if it doesn’t match what it was expecting then it refuses to acknowledge that you have Office installed.

A bit of digging turned up a solution though, and with a BIG nod to JasonD on the AppleInder Forums, here’s what I did, step by step:

Disclaimer: This worked really well for me, but I accept no reponsibility or liability if it does something nasty to your computer.

• Download the update manually from here.
• Mount the image.
• Right-click on the mounted image and click “Duplicate”
• Open the duplicate.
• Unmount the Original image.
• Right-click on the file inside here and “Show Package Contents”
• Navigate to “Contents -> Resources”
• Right-click and “Get Info” on the file named “package_updatable”
• Click the ‘lock’ in the bottom-left of the “Get Info” window.
• Enter your password.
• Change your access permissions to “Read & Write”
• Close “Get Info” window
• Open “package_updatable” with TextEdit or similar
• Remove the 2 lines

if not found_valid_version:
sys.exit(48)

• Save and close.
• Go back to the duplicate image and run “Office 2008 12.1.2 Update”.
• Follow the prompts in the installer.
• Sit back and relax.