Within Windows

Late last month, my colleague Ed Bott stumbled across evidence hinting at the availability of Office 14 (2010) targeted for 64-bit architectures. While Ed found explicit markings indicating such, they were buried in a Windows 7 beta build – a build that isn’t representative of final product (especially visible if you’ve been keeping up with the leaked builds). With similar 64-bit claims back in Office 12 (2003 2007) days, I dismissed the evidence as mere Microsoft internal dog-fooding of some sort.

Last night, however – dum dum dummmm – Microsoft made an Office 14 add-in publicly available for download. While I’m not sure why these add-ins are showing in the Microsoft Download Center, given we can’t get the software (officially), it’s an actual binary generated from an Office 14 SDK targeting 64-bit Office.

Now to get some 64-bit Office 14 bits to play with…