A New Version Of A Textbook Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac

Every retail package of Office 2008 Home & Student edition I've seen is exactly the same. It's a yellow box containing the DVD stored within a white paperboard sleeve. The obverse side of the sleeve has the Office 2008 logo embossed on it. Provides the basics of Office 2008 for Mac for home users and students. Whether your projects are around the house or in the classroom, the reinvented Office 2008 for Mac experience makes it easier than ever to create professional-looking work.

• A New Version Of A Textbook Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac Updates
• A New Version Of A Textbook Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac Download

Rumor has it that Microsoft is on the cusp of releasing a new version of Office for Mac. It's been more than three years since the last version of Office came out. Things have changed a lot.

Is Microsoft Office still important? Since Office's last major release on the Mac, Apple made a major strategic move to trump Microsoft: It began to include productivity apps as part of the standard suite of software applications included on all new Macs and iOS devices. You used to have to buy iWork apps — Pages, Keynote and Numbers — separately, but now you get them for free. Those three apps fill in the gaps for some users who need word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software capabilities. There are certainly some benefits, too, such as iCloud support and binary compatibility for documents, making it simple to edit files on your Mac and use them on your iPad, or vice versa. Other options have emerged, too.

Free software alternatives to Office like LibreOffice may still raise eyebrows, but Google has normalized many people to using Google Docs for their productivity software and collaboration needs, for example. IWork is good, but it's not that good. As I said back in February,. Despite the advances that Apple has made, Microsoft Office still reigns supreme in corporate environments and elsewhere.

Many businesses and institutions continue to rely on Office as their standard. Like most alternative productivity suites, iWork apps try to be good corporate citizens, offering Office file compatibility for import and export, but there's a difference between file compatibility and native file support, and many users of iWork apps and other tools have run into issues with documents just not looking right when they're translated into Office formats. As I said at the outset, Apple has changed, but so has Microsoft. Much of their focus has been to make Office a subscription-based service rather than a monolithic software suite that gets updated once every few years. You can still buy Office in a single user version. But Microsoft is following Adobe's Creative Cloud lead, offering an annual subscription with the promise of regular updates, along with other benefits, such as the ability to share one subscription with multiple devices, a free OneDrive cloud service account with 20 GB of storage, free Skype world minutes and more.

Of course, a new version of Office for Mac is only one tantalizing piece of the puzzle. The other is a version of Office that will run on iPads.

Microsoft expert Mary Jo Foley suggested in February that an iPad version is coming, perhaps some time in the first half of 2014. A well-integrated Mac and iPad Microsoft Office ecosystem would certainly be fierce competition for Apple, which is still in a rebuilding year after gutting the iWork apps to get them to work more seamlessly across iOS and OS X.

Another piece of the puzzle: Microsoft may in the next few weeks. Microsoft's note-taking app is a decade old, but it's not available in Mac native form, leaving the market wide open for competitors like Evernote to dominate. Office remains one of the best selling software packages for the Mac. Lots of Mac users depend on Office to get their work done, and that's unlikely to change.

Office is still front and center for many in the corporate and institutional worlds. The combination of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac, Office for iPad and OneNote for Mac suggests that Microsoft still thinks that Apple's platforms are still fertile ground.

Even if you don't like Microsoft's products, you have to admit that the company's continued support is a net positive: It makes it easier to justify using Macs and iOS devices in enterprise and reduces friction for users who want to effortlessly produce documents that their non-Apple using colleagues can work. To answer my initial question, Microsoft Office's role has changed.

It's no longer irreplaceable - fact is, there are a lot of options people can use if they want to produce word processing docs, spreadsheets and attractive presentations. But Office is still a vital and important tool for many of us, and that won't change. Are you looking forward to a new version of Office for the Mac? Will you migrate to new Office apps for OS X and iOS? Let me know what you think in the comments.

It has been 24 years since Microsoft first released Word, and four years since the program’s last major upgrade. How much more can Microsoft do to tweak its venerable word processor? Surprisingly, Word gets several major enhancements in Office 2008, the first version of Microsoft’s productivity suite to run natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs. Those changes include a new document format, a simplified toolbar, and a new toolbox that combines palettes for managing formatting, clip art, iPhoto images, research, and bibliographies. But the biggest improvement is the addition of a new view option called Publishing Layout. In this new view, arranging text and graphics on the page is far simpler than it was in previous versions of Word. Like Apple, Microsoft has apparently concluded that people use word processing programs for far more than just creating text-based documents.

Creating complex, graphics-rich documents requires tools historically found in powerful page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. Like, Microsoft Word now allows you to select a distinct editing environment specifically for creating layout-intensive documents.

That environment is Publishing Layout. The biggest downside in what would otherwise be an excellent upgrade: the elimination of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). In its place, Word 2008 offers limited support for AppleScript and Automator.

Those replacements don’t offer the recording or other features that made it pretty simple to automate and customize Word 2004. If you’re accustomed to Word 2004’s automation features, you’re going to be disappointed in Word 2008.

Preferences Pane: Word’s new preferences pane is more Mac-like and better organizes Word’s many preference options, making it much easier to customize the program. Fresh look Like the other Office 2008 apps, Word has a new user interface that makes it easier to manage preferences, consolidates most of Word’s formatting tools, and puts key document elements—including cover pages, headers, footers, and bibliographies—a single click away. The first and most obvious interface change is the new toolbar. It sits at the top of your document window, rather than being tied to the menu bar. In previous versions, Word’s toolbars could fill up most of the top of your screen.

They were too easy to accidentally rearrange and contained way more buttons than most people used. Word 2008’s simpler toolbar includes all of what you need to effectively open, create, and save documents, undo and redo changes, and add tables and columns.

If there’s a button you don’t want or one that you think is missing, it’s easy to change the toolbar. Unfortunately, Word still doesn’t use the typical Mac toolbar customization sheet; Microsoft says those sheets couldn’t manage all the options Microsoft wanted to offer.

Just below Word’s toolbar is the Elements Gallery, a set of five new buttons from which you can quickly add document elements, tables, charts, SmartArt graphics, and WordArt to documents. The Document Elements button, for example, lets you quickly add or modify cover pages, headers and footers, or a table of contents. Some users may find it annoying that they can’t remove this Gallery; I think more will be grateful for its presence. Elements Gallery: You can’t get rid of the toolbar that now appears at the top of every document, but it does give you quick access to all kinds of graphics and other document options. Word 2008’s new Toolbox combines a bunch of different palettes in one floating tool.

From it, you can quickly access formatting options, insertable symbols, clip art, your iPhoto library, reference tools, and Office’s Scrapbook and Project Center. In previous versions, those tools were scattered among menus, toolbars, and floating palettes; they’re now all in one place. Aside from the formatting tools, I particularly liked the Toolbox’s Citations panel, which allows you to quickly and simply create a database of reference works. By adding articles, Web sites, books, and other materials to this database, you can easily add them to your document.

Word will then automatically create a bibliography or citation page (in APA, Chicago, MLA, or Turabian format). Previous editions of Word had limited versions of this feature, but it was not this obvious or easy to use.

Still, the Toolbox lacks the simplicity of Pages’ floating palettes. For example, depending on what was selected in my document and which disclosure triangles were opened, the Formatting palette sometimes outgrew my screen—even when I was working on a 20-inch iMac. Closing those disclosure triangles took care of this problem, but it would be nice if Word worked more like Pages, which uses a tabbed format for document options and which allows you to open more than one floating palette at a time. I was also frustrated by the fact that my scroll wheel didn’t work on scrollbars in the formatting palette but did work on other scrollbars in the Toolbox.

A New Version Of A Textbook Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac Updates

One other nice interface change: Word 2008’s new Preferences panel is much better organized and more Mac-like than Word 2004’s. Publishing tools Publishing Layout: Word’s new Publishing Layout view gives you greater control over how text and images appear in your documents.

It’s always been a bit frustrating using Word to create brochures, postcards, posters, or other types of documents that require arranging different elements on the page. Previous versions simply haven’t been designed to perform that kind of page layout magic. Word 2008’s new Publishing Layout view changes that dramatically. Publishing Layout offers a bunch of tools for placing and manipulating text and graphics on the page. Like Pages, Word 2008 allows you to create template documents with image and text placeholders; you can drag and drop images and text into those placeholders, making it easy to turn those templates into new, fresh documents. You can also link text boxes so text overflows from one to another. The image-editing tools in Publishing Layout aren’t as good as those in Pages.

While it is possible to add masks and transparency and make minor adjustments to images in your document, the program is nowhere near as adept at it as Pages. Another thing I noticed: the longer I worked in Publishing Layout mode, the slower Word seemed to get when manipulating images or moving text boxes around on the page. Bye-bye, VBA Word 2008 adopts the new, XML-based.docx format for documents. That format makes Word 2008 compatible with the latest version of Word for Windows. Unfortunately, those documents can’t be opened in older versions of Word without the downloadable.docx converter from Microsoft. To bypass this problem, Word 2008 does allow you to save documents in the older.doc format using a Compatibility Mode.

A New Version Of A Textbook Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac Download

More significantly, Office 2008 marks the demise of Visual Basic for Applications. In its stead, Word includes an AppleScript library.

Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, Word’s AppleScript library isn’t nearly as complete as the VBA library was. In addition, while there are 30 Automator actions for Word, they aren’t that useful. Neither AppleScript nor Automator will let you record a string of events in Word and save them as a reusable script. Word does a good job of merging data from a variety of sources, including text files, Office’s own address book, and FileMaker Pro. But, unlike Pages, Word can’t merge data from Apple’s Address Book app.

I’d prefer a program that can merge data from any source. But, given the choice, I’d take Word’s missing Address Book merge to Pages’ missing everything else. Should I stay? The question for most Mac users isn’t “Should I buy Word 2008?” It’s “Should I upgrade?” As a word processor, Word 2008 is no better or worse than Word 2004. You’ll be able to create and format documents the way you want to, print them, and get them out the door. But the new user interface is cleaner; thanks to some great design decisions at Microsoft, there’s virtually no learning curve.

Yes, it’s a pain that you can’t hide the Elements Gallery, but it never got in my way and it definitely put some previously hard-to-find features at my fingertips. Word’s enhanced publishing tools are a huge plus; Windows users have had Publisher for eons and the addition of Publishing Layout levels the playing field for Mac users. That said, you can get better page layout tools for less money (without losing Office file compatibility) from iWork’s Pages. The loss of VBA is a travesty; if you’re using Word in a mixed business environment with both Macs and Windows machines and you rely on a lot of macros, it’s a deal breaker.

The Automator scripts that come with Word 2008 are not particularly valuable as automation tools, and there’s no easy way to automate with AppleScript. If you need automation, Word 2008 is not for you. Macworld’s buying advice As a word processor, little has changed in Word 2008. The elimination of VBA and weak support for AppleScript and Automator make the program far less versatile and valuable for users who really need automation. But the program’s streamlined interface and the addition of the new Publishing Layout view make it a compelling choice, especially if you want to stretch Word beyond its current capabilities.

Jeffery Battersby is a network manager who lives in upstate New York. You can read his blog at.