Almost an year after of the release of ‘Office2007’, Microsoft released its ‘Office 2008’ for Mac PC on January 15,2008. The process of development took nearly four years. This latest product from Microsoft would share ‘Open XML’ file format on the lines of ‘Office 2007’ system family of products.

“What we tried to achieve with Office 2008 for the Mac is to help users get their work done more simply, and compatibility was a big driver here” said Amanda Lefebvre, the Marketing Manager for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit.

Compatibility is the big issue that everyone is looking for eagerly. Users quite often share documents across platforms. With this focus, the ‘Office2008’ has been designed to work natively on both Power PCs and Intel-based Macs. Microsoft has also worked out the speed with many improvements across-the-board.

In order to provide an extended facility to the users Microsoft has worked on the compatibility issue with much attention. It is now expected to give a good compatibility experience to the users.”While this is new and users will have to figure out how to work with it” says Amanda Lefebvre.

Microsoft has created downloadable converters for ‘Word’ and ‘PowerPoint’. Both were in beta format. It has also updated the ‘Excel’ and will be included very soon. This way a user can easily work within its current ‘Office 2004’ for Mac format and the new ‘Open XML’ format in the 2008 version.

Microsoft is also working on an integrated converter for the 2004 version and this will be available sometime in the middle of this year. This facility helps users to save their 2004 files. Amanda Lefebvre says, “It will be seamless experience as documents will be automatically converted behind the screen”.

Office 2008 for Mac has been configured with sharing the same graphics engine as the 2007 Office System. Advantages of this tool like glows, shines, and reflections have been extended to the users. Similarly, the art tools are also provided to the users facilitating them with sharing of the graphics.

Office 2008 for Mac also has re-engineered user interface including ‘Elements Gallery’, a visual thumbnail of design, format and other options. This interface is quite similar to the ‘Ribbon User Interface’ of Office 2007.

Word 2008, one of its main components, has a ‘Publishing Layout View’ for Mac. Users can easily lay out ‘rich type’ documents, drop in images and apply effects with a range of available templates.

“My Day” is a stand-alone application for Mac-only. It is found in the personal information manager known as ‘Entourage’, which allows users to manage their schedules in all ways.

‘Excel 2008’ has Ledger Sheets in the Elements Gallery. These are basically pre-formulated worksheets helping users accomplish related tasks. The core Office 2008 for Mac is bundled with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage and enabled Microsoft Exchange.

For single license Microsoft would charge $399.95 and an upgrade version would costs $239.95.’Home’ and ‘Student’ editions come without ‘Exchange and Automator Tools’ with a cost of $149.95.