Late Thursday, Microsoft released updates for its Microsoft Office 2008 suite as well as its Open XML Converter applications.

The new version of Microsoft Office 2008, a 23.8 megabyte download, corrects a problem that prevented Office 2008 from opening some Open XML documents. Office 2008 would, under certain circumstances, display an error indicating that it couldn’t open the file, and instructed the user to download a more recent update of Office for Mac.

According to TidBITS, Microsoft indicated that the problem affected Open XML Word, Excel, PowerPoint presentation and PowerPoint show files, along with templates and macro-enabled Open XML documents and templates.

The Open XML Converter utility, which reached version 1.1.1, is available as a 45 megabyte download.

The updates require Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later to install and run.