![]() ![]() In addition to the previous version's slightly silly-looking Notebook view, which uses a lined-paper-style background and optional tabs, the new version adds a Publishing Layout view with an even sillier-looking (but harmless) wood-grain background on which I could store pictures and other document elements before dragging them into a file. Word now makes document building easy by adding a Document Elements feature like that in Office 2007, so I could drag into a document prebuilt designs for title pages, contents, and headers and footers. Users who work on both Macs and Windows-based PCs are left with having to navigate two completely different interfaces. The interface would fit right into the graphics-rich Mac environment, and it's a major disappointment that Microsoft didn't introduce it to the Mac. Opinions are mixed on the Fluent interface, but I prefer it to old-style menu clutter. Instead, it offers an ordinary toolbar (customizable only in Entourage, not in the other applications), with a set of tabs below it that lead to a distractingly animated "gallery" of charts and table formats. One enormous difference between this suite and last year's release for Windows: Office 2008 for Mac doesn't have the "Fluent" interface, which made its first appearance (originally under the name "Ribbon") in Office 2007 for Windows. The improved graphic and typographic features, which play catch-up with Apple's iWork '08 application suite and Microsoft's unique SmartArt feature, which produces beautiful, highly editable graphic views of tabular data. What's more, I much appreciated the suite's new exterior polish-its Mac-like preference dialogs Additionally, I was pleased to find native use of the new Office 2007 file formats and hand-holding helpers for mail merge in Word and formula building in Excel. ![]() As I had expected, the new version impressed me with its fast operation on Intel-based Macs. I found some, but not all, of the improvement I had anticipated. I had hoped that Office 2008 would give me Mac versions of the Office applications that would be as reliable, flexible, and innovative as the corresponding programs in Office 2007 for Windows. A "Special Media Edition" ($499.95 list $299.95 upgrade) adds the Microsoft Expression Media program for graphics asset management Expression Media was called iView before Microsoft acquired it.- Next: What I Wanted, What I Got A "Home and Student Edition" ($149.95 list no special upgrade price) omits Microsoft Exchange support for Entourage and also omits the OS X Automator actions for workflows, which are included in the standard version. ![]() Office 2008 ($399.95 list $239.95 upgrade) comprises Mac versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, along with the Entourage program, which does much of what Outlook does for Windows Office users. And, especially if you're an advanced user, you might consider sitting out this version entirely. ![]() If you've been impatient to upgrade, I think you'd be wise to wait, at least until Microsoft releases one or two bug-fixing updates. Office 2008 will be released for sale on January 15, and I'm sorry to report that in my first few days of testing the final code, I found a mixed bag of improvements, incompatibilities, and bugs. Anyone with a new Intel-based Mac has been eager for a version of Office that can run natively-and at top speed-on this new, powerful platform. Among Mac users, Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is probably the most-widely awaited software release of the year, partly because Office is the most powerful and most widely compatible application suite available for OS X and partly because all previous versions were written for the old PowerPC platform. ![]()
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