Īlso, Office for Mac 2004 has a shorter lifecycle than Office 2003. This issue has not been fixed in Office 2008 or 2011 either. There is no support for editing right to left and bidirectional languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2004. However, this issue persists in Office 2008. Peter Clark of Geek Boy's Blog presented one solution in December 2004.

Instead, the Windows user is told 'QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture'. Images inserted into any Office 2004 application by using either cut and paste or drag and drop result in a file that does not display the inserted graphic when viewed on a Windows machine. Office for Mac 2004 has a number of limitations compared to Office 2003 for Windows.

Virtual PC does not work on Intel-based Macs and in August 2006, Microsoft announced it would not be ported to Intel-based Macintoshes, effectively discontinuing the product. Included with Office 2004 for Mac Professional Edition, Microsoft Virtual PC is a hypervisor which emulates Microsoft Windows operating systems on Mac OS X which are PowerPC-based. Support for Office 2004 ended January 10, 2012. Microsoft ultimately shipped support for Visual Basic in Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, which also dropped PowerPC support altogether. However, Office 2008 did not include support for Visual Basic for Applications, which made Microsoft extend the support period of Office 2004 from Octoto January 10, 2012. Office 2004 was replaced by its successor, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which was developed as a universal binary to run natively on Intel Macs. For this reason, it is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and newer. The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer. It is equivalent to Office 2003 for Windows. Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Mac OS X.

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