Review: Office 2008 For Mac

That about sums up Office 2008 for Mac.

There was a feeling of excitement at the CMP Channel Test Center when Office 2008 for Mac arrived in the mail. It installed easily, and visually, it was pretty. True to form, Office 2008 is packed with all kinds of engaging gadgets and useful tools. However, the changes to the core applications -- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- seemed to be more in aesthetics rather than in functionality.

Office 2003 for Mac was fairly equivalent in look and feel with Office 2003 for Windows. It may have been too nave to assume that Office 2008 for Mac would fill a similar spot for Office 2007 on Windows.

Many things stayed the same in Office 2008 from previous versions. It was reassuring to find the familiar menu bar at the top of the screen, with menus for File, Edit, View, Insert, etc. Everything was still in the right place. The floating palettes had all the toolbars, for formatting, for styles, alignment, margins, etc. However, the first question upon opening Word was, "Where's the ribbon?" This is good news to those users who dislike the ribbon (and there is nothing wrong with not liking the ribbon). It was just odd that after redoing the entire look and feel on Word 2007, that Microsoft chose to leave out the ribbon in this version.

Not only is there no ribbon, there is no handy toolbar at the top with buttons for saving and basic editing tools. Oddly enough, Excel and PowerPoint has a basic toolbar on top of the window. Thankfully, there aren't many of these jarring discontinuities.

Overall, the integration of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is seamless and well done. In one test, a chart was inserted in a Word document and data entered into an Excel spreadsheet, without even realizing that the spreadsheet was open in Excel. In this case, the applications behaved similarly to Office 2007.

In the past, it didn't matter whether Office was on a PC or Mac -- things were generally in the same places and behaved similarly. That's no longer the case. Solution providers planning to shift Windows customers to the Mac may have to reconsider, based on whether this is considered a showstopper. Office 2008, especially Word, is sufficiently different enough from Office 2007 on Windows that users will spend time just trying to figure things out.

It was difficult to find many of the commands. The Formatting Palette is a bit crowded with all the various options so it takes a while to find the familiar buttons. However, going in to Customize Toolbars and un-clicking the "Dock" option for each toolbar releases them from the Formatting Palette to float anywhere on the screen. They can then be dragged to the top of the window to mimic the old toolbars from the past.

Customize, customize, customize. The level of customization available is pleasant. Not only could the palettes be split up to create the static toolbars, there was a way to modify the menu bars. Under Customize Toolbars, users can select various commands and just drag them onto the main menu bar at the top. Perhaps the user needs to have the Word Count command appear under the File menu instead of the traditional Tools menu. Users can just drag the command off Tools and onto File. Or have the alignment options available as a top-level command in Format instead of buried under "Paragraph" -- it's just a click and drag away. Users can also create their own toolbar, with their own set of commands onto a toolbar that floats anywhere on the screen. It can even be dragged to the top of the screen to make the toolbar/ribbon that's missing.

Documents moved back and forth between Mac and Windows without trouble, so a mixed office can continue to function this way. Just as Windows users had to get used to a lot of new things with Office 2007, Mac users are due for their retraining.

There is one new feature that is tough to decide whether or not it is any good: the Elements Gallery. The gallery sits on top of the window, and has four (Excel), five (Word), or six (PowerPoint) tabs with advanced formatting options. In PowerPoint, the Elements Gallery is split into categories such as slide themes, slide layouts, transitions, and table layouts. Once a tab is selected, a gallery opens up, with graphical representations of options. Under slide layouts, there are images of the various layouts available -- selecting on one changes the active slide to that format. This is very convenient and much easier than previous methods. However, in Word, the options are document elements, such as table of contents, headers, and footers, quick tables and charts, and WordArt. The area could have been devoted to better use.

Office 2008 for Mac doesn't revolutionize the application or the way users work -- not in the way Office 2007 did for Windows users. It kept a lot of the old, beloved features, and slapped on a slick interface. The level of customization allowed saves this product from just being eye candy.