Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student EditionĮach includes the basics of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage and Messenger, while Office 2008 for Mac (the version I am reviewing) adds Exchange Server support and a large set of Automator actions, while Office 2008 for Mac Special Edition also adds Expression Media (formerly available as iView Media Pro before its recent acquisition by Microsoft).Preferences are still modal, unfortunately, making it impossible to do anything else on a document while the preference window is open, and bizarrely, they still mix both application preferences and individual document preferences within the same window. Preferences, too, are now much slicker and more Mac-like, including an Apple-style search box for getting directly to a specific setting without unnecessary clicking. One headline feature of the new interface - the Elements Gallery - appears to be inspired directly by Pages (Apple’s word processor included in iWork) and unobtrusively provides easy access to a whole collection of enhancements for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Office 2008 also includes a redesigned and more consistent interface throughout the suite, one which Microsoft hopes will expose more of the software’s power to new and intermediate users. Under Word 2004, a magnification like 150% was almost unusable, with quirky spacing between words and individual letters, but this problem is no more. Office 2008 also sports a new rendering engine which among other things greatly improves the display of text in Word at 25% increments of magnification. While this can make for a big speed improvement on Intel machines, unfortunately in my experience on a dual processor G5, the suite ran even more slowly than before, especially at launch time. What’s New, and What’s Included?įor users of Intel-based Macs, the most notable change delivered by Office 2008 is native Intel code: as a Universal binary, the suite now runs natively on both PowerPC machines and Intel machines, so no more reliance on the Rosetta emulation environment for Intel Macs. This is, after all, a review of Microsoft Office 2008! But at the same time, if you are evaluating the purchase or upgrade path to Office 2008, it is just no longer as straightforward as simply examining the latest features or checking compatibility with the PC-based Office 2007 suite. None of this is intended to suggest that Microsoft Office is somehow unnecessary, or that its role as the de facto standard for office business is going to change any time soon. These days, a ‘presentation’ may wind up being delivered to colleagues across the world via a few web pages rather than via a traditional ‘slide pack’. In some ways, even tools for working with Flash have become indirect competitors to tools like PowerPoint - not because the tools perform anything like the same job, but because the job no longer has to be done in just one way. Increasingly, important content lives in a collaborative wiki, a non-collaborative static web page or web-accessible database, a simple email or IM. But even in large corporate environments, diversification both in production and ultimate delivery means more and more content in destinations other than those which demand compatibility with Word or PowerPoint. In my own case, this is partly due to my move away from a large corporate environment and into an individual practice environment. Secondly, I have found in my own experience that my work is no longer concentrated so strongly into the production of self-contained documents intended for Word users, for example, or self-contained presentations intended for PowerPoint users or live audiences. Finally, a whole set of free web-based services from Google and others (e.g., Google Docs) has now matured to the point that such tools offer a viable alternative to traditional software packages run directly from your own machine. Apple’s inexpensive iWork suite also offers an easy to use, if somewhat less capable, alternative. Free packages like OpenOffice and the more visually Mac-like NeoOffice provide comprehensive suites which attempt to replicate the Microsoft Office feature set. Since the release of Office 2004, however, two things have changed significantly which raise a whole new set of questions for Mac-using mental health practitioners working in individual or small group practices and considering the step up to Office 2008.įirst, the field of alternative and lower-priced suites which perform similar functions is now more viable than before. Our review of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac commented on the history of Microsoft Office as the de facto standard for office suites, and of course that history has not changed.
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