Microsoft Office:Mac for the Retina Display

Microsoft released update 14.2.4 for Office:mac on September 19. One of the major improvements was support for the new Retina displays featured on Apple's new Macbook Pro line-ups. I installed the update, only to find that the new applications still launched in the low resolution mode.

I checked the Info.plist file and found that Microsoft has indeed enabled the "High Resolution Capable" mode, as can be seen below:

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key><true/>

For some reason, Info.plist was not being loaded when launching the application. After searching, I found a simple hint to force Info.plist to load. Mac OS re-loads Info.plist if the application file's timestamp has changed. So, onwards to Terminal.app, and a few "touch"es got my office applications to launch in the beautiful high resolution mode which I have become so accustomed to!

cd "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/"

touch "Microsoft Word.app"

touch "Microsoft Excel.app"

touch "Microsoft Powerpoint.app"

Voila! The difference is just gorgeous.

As a last word, I will say that the only reason holding me back from switching over to Keynote is the poor implementation of vector graphics and total lack of "Smart Art Objects". This is a big win for Powerpoint over Keynote.