News

Office 2008 for Mac Arriving Today

• By David Nagel
• 01/15/2008

Office 2008 was originally supposed to have shipped last summer but instead arrives today in three versions, including a new education edition. The company is providing guided tours of the latest edition at the Macworld convention through Thursday.

The new version of Office for Mac is a Universal Binary, able to run on both older PowerPC Macs and newer Intel-based Macs natively. The new version incorporates a number of new features and applications, including. among others, Microsoft Messenger for Mac.

Office 2008 for Mac is available in three editions:

• Office 2008 for Mac (standard version), which sells for $399.95 (full version) or $239.95 (upgrade version);
• Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition, which includes three user licenses and basic Office functionality but no connectivity to Exchange servers or support for automated workflows; and
• Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition, which sells for $499.95 (full version) or $299.95 (upgrade version), which also includes the Microsoft Expression Media for Mac digital asset management tool.

Some of the other new features in Office 2008 for Mac include support for Open XML, a redesigned user interface, Ledger Sheets for Excel, My Day for Entourage, Publishing Layout View for Word, and SmartArt graphics for PowerPoint. Office is available in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian.

Sessions at the Macworld expo covering Office 2008 include a hands-on look at the Office 2008 Special Media Edition Jan. 15 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and a conference called "Introducing Office 2008 for Mac: Form, Meet Functionality" to be held Jan. 17 from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.