If you've been dealing with the hassle of opening Microsoft Office 2007 (Windows) or 2008 (Mac) in your older, Mac 2004 version of Office, Microsoft has finally released the free converters you need to open those files.

As c|net points out, the side effect of Microsoft dragging their feet on this likely relates to the fact that they'd rather you upgraded to a new version of Office rather than continue to use your old one. I upgraded last year primarily so I could stop emailing people to ask them to re-save their documents in a compatible format, but I can't say there's any other feature of Office 2008 that I thought was worth upgrading for. (I've started working as much as possible in Pages, InDesign, or Dreamweaver, then sending people PDFs or URLs unless they need to edit rather than just read/comment, in which case I have to resort to Office. Luckily, that's not a common occurrence since my inability to play well with others means I don't collaborate very often.)

[via CNET News.com]