After leaving it out of Office 2008 along with Visual Basic for Applications, Microsoft has returned Solver to Excel 2008.

Prior to this addition, Office users would have to use Office 2004 for Excel if they needed solver, defeating the purpose of having Office 2008 on the system. It is a standalone application, and you have to run it alongside Excel. There is not a way to run it from within Excel.

More after the break.

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled new updates to its Office 2004 and 2008 programs. Office 2004 version 11.5.0 adds an update to the Open XML File Converter, allowing for compatibility with the randomly changed file formats of Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac. Office 2008 12.1.1 offers improvements in Word and Excel, with more »

Office 2004 users, you’ve got an update available. The folks over at Redmond have issued update 11.3.6, which address several security issues within the productivity suite. It’s hard to tell what the updates actually fix because it seems like Microsoft is beginning to follow Apple when it comes to providing vague update descriptions. If you more »