Mac-only features in Office 2008

by Stephen Withers

Wednesday, 10 January 2007

News about Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac stays on drip-feed from the company, though some interesting new features have been disclosed.

As we already knew, the next version will run natively on both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs, and it won't ship until several months after Office 2007 for Windows. Microsoft's still not being any more specific about the release date than "the second half of 2007."

One piece of welcome information is that Office 2007 and 2008 will share a common graphics engine, and according to reports, Microsoft promises pixel-perfect equivalence whether a document is opened in Office 2007 or 2008.

We were also pleased to learn that Office 2007's Ribbon (with the consequent loss of familiarity) will not be part of Office for Mac. Instead, there will be a new context-sensitive toolbar called the Elements Gallery. One of its tools - Document Parts - is said to simplify tasks such as setting up a table of contents or headers and footers.

New Mac-only features will include Publishing Layout View (exposes desktop publishing layout tools and provides text box entry), Ledger Sheets (to handle common financial management tasks such as chequebook balancing in Excel), and My Day (shows schedules and tasks in all Office applications, even if Entourage isn't running).

Like Office 2007, Office 2008 will use the Office Open XML file formats. A public beta release of converters allowing Office 2004 to read these formats will occur "in the [northern] spring of 2007" with final versions appearing six to eight weeks after Office 2008.

In releated news, Microsoft has released an update for Office 2004 that includes a patch for a "critical" flaw in Excel. {moscomment}

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