Thanks to some very excited English teachers and a constant stream of emails from interested Mac users, we now have a version of Annotate for Word that runs on Mac Office 2004.
Yes, that was five years ago, but progress is progress.
With the latest release of Mac Office (2008), Microsoft dropped support for Visual Basic for Applications, which is what we wrote the older version of Annotate with (the Word 2007 version is written using .NET). But just as with Word 2007 on the Windows side of the world, many teachers haven’t bothered upgrading. So there are still a lot of Word 2004 computers out there, and we hope to help a lot of those computers help their owners create better feedback for their students.
The free version of Annotate for Word 2004 for Mac Office 2004 (we haven’t figured out a more elegant way to name the thing that is also specific enough) isn’t quite ready, but we’ve got a number of PRO users going already. So don’t hesitate to be in touch…
Authentic Assessment 
Annotate looks interesting, but I find myself moving toward google docs with my students and I avoid Word at all costs. Shame it cannot be a standalone program that would work with any sort of document (Word, PDF, Pages, etc.). Oh, well…
We know exactly what you mean…
The next version of Annotate (due out this month) is far more sophisticated, but we have made a decision to only support Word 2007 for the PC rather than try to deal with Mac Office 2008 and older versions of Word. So that’s doubly unhelpful to you.
Since you are interested in these things, and your students might find it interesting/useful, check out:
http://www.offisync.com/
It’s a free addin that lets you access and edit Google docs from MS Office – so when you edit them locally, the edits are saved to the cloud…which is a potential boon to teachers who are trying to handle documents more efficiently. Unfortunately OffiSync doesn’t support Comments or Track Changes, so its utility is limited if you’re interested in commenting…but it’s one to watch.