It painlessly installed here in minutes on a Mac Mini freshly loaded with the Leopard version of the Mac OS X, and getting to work right away was as easy as apple pie. All the usual elements were there: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage.

It's a new day for the Mac platform - - with Apple's technology in the hands of millions more than a year ago with advent of the iPhone, the success of Leopard and a freshly minted 7.3 percent market share. (Interesting note: This is being written in Office 2008 for Mac Word and, oddly, "iPhone' comes up as an incorrect word in spell check. Expect a few emails between Cupertino and Redmond on that one.)

Entourage is just great eye candy, with a potentially powerful "Projects" manager and floating "MyDay" calendar gadget, which detaches from the application itself and floats on the desktop if you want. A PowerPoint presentation created in Office 2007 for Windows opens perfectly in PowerPoint in Office 2008 for Mac.

The full version of Office 2008 for Mac is list-priced at $399.95. But Google Docs also works for those who use a Mac, as does OpenOffice.org - - two productivity suites that are free. (Although both OpenOffice.org and Google Docs can't spell "iPhone," either.)

Right now, Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac do offer functionality and a look and feel that are light years ahead of the free alternatives. And nobody has yet developed an application that's even close to Office 2007's version of Access. But it's clear that the uneasy alliance that has existed between Apple and Microsoft will face new tests - - from new competitors and from economic realities ($399.95!)

For now, though, they both keep the eye candy coming, it continues to work well and it continues to impress. Now, about that spell check. . .