Office 2008 for Mac Ships

Office 2008 for Mac, the latest release of Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite for the Mac, supports new Office 2007 file formats, introduces minor updates to the user interface that skip the radical overhaul of Office 2007 for Windows, and improves support for Exchange e-mail. The new version completes the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors, which will improve the suite’s performance in some areas. However, it faces new competition and also drops support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Office’s macro language, making it harder to automate repetitive tasks and share some documents between Windows and the Mac.

Updating Office

Office 2008 brings the product up to date with two important changes in the market: it’s the first version of Office since Apple’s 2006 transition from PowerPC to Intel processors and the first version since the release of Office 2007 for Windows, which brought with it new file formats and a new and radically different user interface.

Office 2008 also comes at an important time: continuing strong iPod sales and the associated “halo effect” have brought increasing numbers of users from Windows to the Mac—according to IDC, Apple was third in U.S. computer sales in 2007 (behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard) and had the fastest-growing U.S. unit sales among the top five manufacturers, at 31%. Although the Mac OS includes built-in tools for e-mail, calendar, and contact management, most users need some kind of productivity suite, and for years Office for the Mac was the de facto choice because it was the only full-featured product available and offered compatibility with the file formats used by Office for Windows. But the Aug. 2007 introduction of iWork ’08, an update to Apple’s own desktop productivity suite, changed matters by adding a spreadsheet (Numbers) to its existing word processor (Pages) and presentation program (Keynote).