Office for Mac 2008 SP2

The second service pack for Office 2008 for Mac, released in July 2009, fulfills Microsoft’s promise of letting Mac users edit documents on a SharePoint site without having to download them and delivers a number of other improvements. The free update is the latest effort to bring Office on the Mac closer to feature parity with the popular PC version, although there are still notable gaps, particularly when working with SharePoint.

Specific improvements in Office for Mac 2008 SP2 include the following:

Document Connection for Mac. This free tool, included with SP2, lets Mac users work more easily with documents stored on a SharePoint Server or Office Live Workspace (a Microsoft-hosted service for document-sharing and collaboration that’s based on SharePoint technology). Instead of having to download documents, make changes locally, and then upload them back to the server, the Document Connection tool lets users work directly on documents stored in these locations. Document Connection can be launched as its own application or from menu items within Office applications such as Word. However, even with this tool, Mac users don’t have certain capabilities that the PC version of Office offers: for instance, they cannot approve documents or manage workflows.