Office 2008

04/01/08 05:37
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Microsoft, the evil empire to a lot of Mac owners, has not released an update to their Office suite for almost 4 years and with the Mac ads attacking Vista and Microsoft I was beginning to wonder if an update would ever be released but in a little over a week the new Mac version of Office will be released. While it is a good upgrade and one that most Mac owners will want to get it is evolutionary rather then revolutionary with some good new features but a lot more that could eventually be added. See Walt Mossberg's review here.



I have been using Office 2007 for the PC as work for over a year and have to say that it a pleasure to use compared to previous versions of Office for the PC. I was therefor anxious to see the changed to the PC version applied to the Mac with attention specifically paid to the advantage of the Mac interface. The good news is that the Office team for Mac has succeeded here. The bad news is that there is still work to be done and hopefully we won't have to wait another 4 years for another upgrade.

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The biggest feature of the Office suite is the "ribbon" at the top of the screen which allows you chose templates and other style elements to your document. Word, Excel and Powerpoint all use this ribbon rather well and in fact they operate faster than the previous version of Office due to upgrades in the code (for Intel Mac's). Entourage, Office's eMail client, is perhaps the biggest letdown. The user interface has not changed but the "my day" glance is great to have if you could have put it on the dashboard. I see no reason to stop using Apple Mail myself because I like the templates that can be customized with my photos.


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Perhaps the nicest feature of Entourage, in addition to support for MS Exchange servers, is the ability to add travel time for your appointment thus blocking out the time on your calendar. This is

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great for people who require time to walk or drive from one meeting to another and prevents people from booking a meeting back to back when your meeting locations are miles apart. However Entourage does still keep all it's mail in once location which can play havoc with Time Machine.


Office 2008 will also read Office files from Office 2007 for the PC so you won't have to save the document as an older version before sending out in eMail.


Overall Microsoft is to be congratulated for continuing to support the Mac with its Office suite but unless they develop a serious upgrade path with updates on a regular basis many Mac owners may start taking a second look at both the Apple office suites (Numbers, Pages, Keynote) and the free Google online office suite. Given the failure of Vista with 5 years and billions of dollars one has to hope that MS will give the Office Mac team the resources they need to stay competitive. Office 2008 will be released on January 15th and can be ordered now on Amazon.com.





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