Why must Macintosh users continue to use old technology, such as Microsoft's Office for Mac 2004? When will the new 2007 version of Office for Mac be released in Hong Kong? Glenn, South Side, Hong Kong Island Why are software products always so late? Can these companies never do anything on time? Name and address supplied DQ: The correct name for the new product referred to in the first question is Microsoft Office for Mac 2008. Microsoft has been delayed in releasing this update to the Office for Mac 2004 productivity suite. It was due to appear in the middle of this year. The recent availability of Apple's Mac OS X version 10.5 - an operating system known as Leopard - will no doubt have an impact on the final release date of Office for Mac 2008. For more information, please visit www.macoffice2008.com and Microsoft's website for the latest updates. Regarding the second question, there are many reasons for software projects to be late. The two most likely reasons concern the large teams of programmers involved in a product's development and the marketing strategy devised by software companies. If my competitor is about to release somethin and I want to trump it, I may announce a similar product even if it is nowhere near completion. A lot of high-profile software products today - Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's Leopard, for example - contain tens of millions of lines of code. All of those must be tested. Even after tests, some bugs are likely to remain undiscovered. One of the reasons Linux, the free Unix-like operating system, has become so popular is the ability of an international community of programmers - numbering in the hundreds of thousands - to work online and look at every line of code. That can help tremendously in finding bugs. I sometimes need to create a large number of folders with similar names on my Mac computer. I have looked at Automator and AppleScript (both are used to create workflows for automating repetitive tasks), but it is all beyond me. Is there an easier way? Name and address supplied DQ: There is a simple way to do this, but it requires using the Terminal (which can be found inside the Mac's Utilities folder of the Applications folder). The process will take two steps. When you run Terminal, you start in a folder inside Users. The name of that folder will depend on the name you gave your system when you set it up. It does not matter what it is. Go to the desktop interface and double-click on your hard-disk drive. If you are showing things in icon mode, go to the folder in which you want to create your new folders. It's important to be able to click on the folder so you can drag it. With that window open, go back to the Terminal window and type 'cd' plus a space at the prompt. Go back to the other window and drag the folder to Terminal and hit the return key. You are now 'inside' that folder. You can create more folders by typing mkdir Name1, Name2, Name3 etc.