A couple days ago, we covered the Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 suite updates, the Office 2004 update being reasonably sized while the Office 2008 update crashed in at over 180 megabytes and functioned as a full service pack.

According to MacFixIt, a umber of users are reporting assorted issues in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint in which documents can't be opened by double-clicking their icons after the Office 2008 update. Instead, users must use the File > Open command in the respective application to open the file at hand.

Per the story:

"I can open them by double-clicking on them and, after the application opens, going to "Open" in the File menu and selecting the document. This only happens on my G5 (which I use at home). 12.1 works fine on my MacPro desktop at my office and my MacBook Pro laptop.

"Interestingly enough, it seems to happen most on documents that were created on Windows machines. I've not had much problem opening existing documents that were created under Office 2004 or the first version of Office 2008."

"Interestingly enough, it seems to happen most on documents that were created on Windows machines. I've not had much problem opening existing documents that were created under Office 2004 or the first version of Office 2008."

A fix for this issue has been discovered by opening the documents with the File > Open command and then re-saving the documents.

Other users have reported success by rebuilding the system's launchservices database with a utility like Onyx.

A number of crashes have also been reported with the user reporting that erasing and rebuilding Word 2008's plist file had no effect.

The final bug posted mentioned the Office 2008 SP1 installer being unable to find Microsoft Office 2008 on the volume at hand.

If you've seen similar bugs since the update or have discovered a workaround or fix, let us know over in the comments or forums.