Office 2008 Gets a Face-Lift With Mac-Like Feel and Features

As you probably know, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) released an upgraded, updated version of its venerable Office suite last January. I've been hard at work on a book about it (Office 2008 for Mac for Dummies -- US$16.49 -- Amazon), so for the past few months I've had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of quality time with it.

Dubbed "Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac," it's still available in three versions, like its predecessor (Office 2004 for Mac):

Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition replaces Office 2004's Student and Teacher Edition. It's still the least expensive ($149.95) edition and still offers three license codes. It includes the four main applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage -- but no Automator or Microsoft Exchange server support.

The Standard edition, known as "Office 2008 for Mac," lists for $399.95 and includes the four main apps, a selection of Mac OS X Automator Actions and sample Workflows, plus support for Microsoft Exchange servers.

Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition replaces Office 2004's Professional edition. This edition lists for $499.95 and includes everything in the Standard edition and more. Where the 2004 Professional edition included the apparently discontinued Virtual PC emulation program, this year's model instead offers Microsoft Expression Media, a media management and presentation program formerly known as "iView Media Pro."

Oh, and all three editions include a copy of the free MSN Messenger client.

What's New, Pussycat?

Some of the biggest news about Office 2008 is pretty much invisible and tucked away under the hood. That news is that Office 2008 is a Universal binary application, which means that it's optimized for Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) processors but still pretty spry running on a PowerPC Mac. I'll tell you a bit more about what this might mean to you in the "Other Stuff" section later in this review.

Another new feature that's easily overlooked is that this release has been "modernized" and (finally) looks like a genuine Mac program rather than a Windows port. Document windows sport a Mac OS X-style toolbar that offers pretty much the same functionality as the previous version's very Windows-ish Standard toolbar. Alas, the Customize Toolbar option hasn't changed and still requires you to muck around in an unwieldy modal dialog box (rather than using the typical Mac OS X drop-down sheet).

Along the same lines, the preferences dialogs now look like Mac preference dialogs complete with rows of icons like System Preferences. However, unfortunately, unlike many Mac OS X programs, said preferences dialogs are totally modal and block you from doing anything -- such as editing your document, selecting menu items, or clicking toolbar icons -- until you click the OK button. Boo. Hiss.

The biggest visible feature is the addition of something called the "Elements Gallery," a collection of enhancements that can be added to your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with just a couple of clicks. It expands and collapses at will and appears below the standard toolbar. Word's Elements Gallery is shown collapsed (top) and expanded (bottom):

The tabs available in the Excel (Sheets, Charts, SmartArt Graphics, WordArt) and PowerPoint (Slide Themes, Slide Layouts, Transitions, Table Styles, Charts, SmartArt Graphics, WordArt) Elements Galleries differ slightly, but all work the same. Click a tab to expand it; click a sub-tab (Cover Pages, Table of Contents, Header, Footer, and Bibliographies in Word's Document Elements tab) to expand it, and then click an item to insert it in your document instantly.

SmartArt Graphics are a new element available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. They are used to turn data into dynamic shapes, which allows you to create instant diagrams with no artistic talent whatsoever required. Here's an example using PowerPoint. First, select some text (or numbers) ...

Now, click an item in the SmartArt Graphics tab to create a diagram from that text ...

If you're not happy with the way it appears, just click on a different item and the diagram changes instantly...

The Text Pane appears automatically when you create a SmartArt Graphic so you can edit your text and see the changes reflected in the diagram immediately. It's a unique approach to turning words (or numbers) into meaningful graphic images, but used judiciously it can be a huge time saver, letting you improve the quality of your communications without a lot of additional time.

The Toolbox in the Office 2008 applications is much more functional than in the previous edition. With multiple tabs (Formatting Palette, Object Palette, Scrapbook, etc. as shown in Word's Toolbox below), many of which sport multiple panels (Font, Styles, and Document Theme are disclosed in this figure).

So many functions that resided in disparate locations in earlier releases of Office are now consolidated in a single, handy, floating inspector-style palette.

For those in academia, the new Citations palette makes managing citations and bibliographies easier by an order of magnitude.

Finally, editions other than the Home and Student Edition include several sample Automator workflows as well as an extensive set of Automator actions for each application so you can build Automator workflows of your own. Here's what Word's sample Workflow menu looks like.

Here's what the Save the current file in Word 97-2004 format Automator workflow looks like.

Here are the Automator actions available for creating Microsoft Word workflows.

So there you have it -- those are the most significant new features available across the board (in all Office apps). Now, allow me to home in on each of the four main applications in turn, with an emphasis on new or improved features ...

Word Up

I'd say Word's biggest improvement is that there are more ready-made documents and document parts provided, and the new Publishing Layout view gives you more of a page layout environment than Word has ever offered.

First, the Project Gallery, which appears when you launch Word (and Excel and PowerPoint) is relatively unchanged from previous versions. The big difference is that there is much more content now -- more templates, forms and other document types -- including many which would have been awkward (or impossible) with the new Publishing Layout view. For example, many of the templates in the Newsletter category (shown here) would be difficult or impossible to create in previous versions of Word.

In fact, the Publishing Layout view looks so different from Word views you've seen in previous versions -- such as the Draft, Print Layout, Notebook and Outline views -- that you might not even recognize it. In the image here, compare the toolbar in Publishing Layout view to the toolbar shown in the Word's Elements Gallery pictures earlier in this review. The tools in the Publishing Layout toolbar include a pointer (selection) tool, a grabber hand tool, arrange and group tools, plus tools for linking and unlinking text in text boxes. Also note the Master Pages tab near the bottom right corner of the window.

The point I'm trying to make is that when you're using Word in its Publishing Layout view, it looks and feels more like a page layout program such as Pages (iWork), Quark XPress, or even Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) InDesign, than like Word.

In the picture here you can see three elements from the Elements Gallery in a single document ... the left-hand page is an example of a Cover Page element. The right-hand page is displaying Header and Footer elements as well as a Table of Contents element.

As you can see, these elements are kind of like mini-templates you can insert into your documents. I haven't gotten a ton of use out of the Elements Gallery yet but I expect to over time.

Excel Ledger and Chart

In Excel, the most notable new features are the Ledger Sheet and Chart elements in Excel's Elements Gallery, the new Formula Builder palette, and Formula AutoComplete. The elements are time savers to be sure, but the new formula features make using Excel significantly easier for occasional users such as yours truly.

Ledger Sheets, which you can select from either the Project Gallery dialog displayed when you launch Excel or the Elements Gallery ribbon below the Standard Toolbar in document windows, take the concept of templates to a new level. They're ready to rock with all of the formulas, list management features and graphical elements pre-configured.

Here's what the service invoice ledger sheet looks like.

Another nice touch is that the category column is pre-populated with a lengthy list of possible category names. To choose a category for an entry, you can either choose from a pop-up menu or start typing and let Excel AutoComplete the category name as shown here.

The process of creating a chart is much easier than in previous versions of Excel, mostly due to the ability to use the Elements Gallery and the Toolbox together to try various options quickly and painlessly. In the figure here I selected the data in the first two columns and then clicked one of the pie chart elements in the Elements Gallery. A couple of clicks in the toolbox added the labels, legend and percentages. Total time expended: under two minutes.

Then, I decided it might be more meaningful as a bar chart, so I clicked a bar chart in the Elements Gallery and this was the result.

Total time expended changing from the pie to the bar chart: under 30 seconds.

The whole new metaphor for creating charts makes it faster, easier and (dare I say it) more fun to create charts and to check out a variety of different renditions of your data.

Another new feature sure to please infrequent Excel users is the Formula Builder palette in the Toolbox, which provides easy fill-in-the-blank help with Excel's formulas. Just choose a function (Average in the picture here and fields for the appropriate arguments appear in the palette along with the result of using those values.

The More help on this function link opens Excel Help to the appropriate page, where you can read an even more detailed explanation of the function. These two features combine to make it much easier to create formulas, particularly ones that require infrequently-used functions.

Along the same lines, if you know what function you want to use, the new Formula AutoComplete feature provides a pop-up menu with all of the functions that match what you've typed so far (S-u in the image here).

One last new feature is actually a removed feature you ought to be aware of and that is that this version no longer supports macros created with Visual Basic (which represent the vast majority of macros created with earlier versions of Excel). If you try to open a worksheet with VB macros you'll get a warning and be allowed to either open the sheet with the macros left in place, or open the sheet and delete all of the macros. Either way this could be the deal breaker for serious spreadsheet jockeys. If you have many sheets with macros, think long and hard before you upgrade to Excel for Mac 2008.

By the way, this omission applies equally to Word and PowerPoint macros created with earlier versions of Office -- they won't run in Office 2008 either.

PowerPoint Presentations

Aside from the Mac OS X-like Standard toolbar found in all of the Office 2008 apps, the interface element you're most likely to notice first is that the Slide and Outline views of the previous version of PowerPoint have been replaced by a single three-paned view known simply as "Normal." The pane on the left allows you to choose between thumbnails of your slides or an outline, with the Notes pane always available. Here's what the Normal view looks like with Slides displayed in the left pane (top) and the Outline displayed in the left pane (bottom).

This all-in-one view makes it somewhat easier and faster to toggle between the slides and outline than the previous version's pair of dedicated views.

There are more Themes Layouts, and Transitions available in this version of PowerPoint, and all three are now managed primarily via the Elements Gallery. I feel that the Elements Gallery approach is most useful here in PowerPoint, where you can try out different themes, layouts, transitions, tables, charts, SmartArt and WordArt effects with just a couple of clicks. It makes it easier to explore different looks for your slide show without wasting much (if any) time.

There are new options for tweaking graphic images, and they're all in the Toolbox, which makes it easier than ever to try different effects and approaches. So you have more control over images without having to resort to using another program such as Photoshop, Elements, iPhoto, etc. to tweak your pictures.

Other new features include Dynamic Guides (like those found in Keynote), and a Send to iPhoto command in the File menu.

I have to say that I still find Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Keynote a much more intuitive and easier to use program that lets me create great looking presentations with less effort.