I’ve been waiting a long time for Microsoft to release an update to Office 2008 for Mac that addressed one of the most annoying bugs: the CGBitmapContextGetData: Invalid Context loop. I’ve confirmed that the latest update to Office 2008 for Mac, the 12.1.3 update, seems to have done something to address this issue, at least in Microsoft Word. I’m still getting this error with Excel and PowerPoint, but at least we’re making some progress.
Savvy Mac Office users have been pointing out this issue since early this year, when Office 2008 for Mac was officially released. Many people may not have known that this bug even existed, since it isn’t quite obvious. In fact, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it unless you happened to look at your Console, the log-reading application that’s inside of the Utilities folder of every modern Mac. But if you are an Office 2008 user, you might have suspected a slight performance hit whenever you launched an Office app, or perhaps you noticed your MacBook running a bit hotter when you used Word. That’s because, prior to this latest update, the Mac OS was busy writing entry after entry to your System Log, sometimes many entries per second. Go ahead, launch your console and look at some of your old System Logs in Console. If you’ve been using Office 2008 a lot, you probably have thousands of entries like this…
Oct 15 21:56:56 new-host Microsoft Word[4216]: CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid context
But after applying the latest update from Microsoft, this bug appears to be finally squashed in at least one of the Office apps. Hallelujah! The Microsoft Word team has heard the gnashing of teeth of Mac users, and started to put this silly bit of sloppiness to rest. Now if only they can address this problem with Excel and PowerPoint.