Office 2008 for Mac Preview: "Discovering features" theme; new UI; more

Yesterday the MacFixIt editors had a chance to speak with a few select members of Microsoft's MacBU development team about the newly announced Office 2008 for Mac OS X, which will be available in mid-to-late 2007.

As we previously reported, final Mac OS X converters for Office 2007 for Windows documents will not be available until Office 2008 ships, but beta converters will be available in the Spring of 2007. [For more on that subject, see articles 1 and 2]. We have to wonder, however: if Microsoft showed us what looked like a relatively stable beta edition of Office 2008 this early in the year, why are beta converters for Windows 2007 documents still a few months away? While we did not see a demonstration of this functionality, we would presume that the beta (alpha?) edition of Office 2008 shown to us can open and edit Office 2007 documents. We are following up with the Microsoft Mac BU to find any further explanation, but the company has already defended this tack in a series of blog postings.

That said, though we were shown only some of the expected new functionality in Office 2008, it looks to be a significant upgrade external of its switch to Universal Binary status. There are usually a few crafty features new versions of Office for Mac that cannot be found in the Windows counterpart, and 2008 is no exception.

Microsoft does a fairly extraordinary amount of user feedback collection/testing. According to the presenters with whom we talked, many tested users asked "Wouldn't it be great if i could do this in Office?" regarding functions that were already extant but difficult to access.

Hence the recurring theme that Microsoft strove to achieve with Office 2008 is user-based discovery of generally concealed or hard-to-access functions. To that end, the company invested heavily in redesigning Office for Mac's user interface.

First, the Microsoft MacBU did not (as some expected) mimic Office 2007 for Windows' "Ribbon" function in Office 2008 for Mac OS X. In lieu, the division developed a function called elements gallery -- a context-sensitive horizontal button bar that resides at a prominent level in all of the Office 2008 applications.

For instance, in Word 2008, one view o elements gallery displays document parts; these are items unique to Word that include cover page, table of contents, etc. design controls.

In PowerPoint, one elements gallery displays buttons for accessing slide themes, transitions, etc.

Microsoft also continues to embrace palettes emphatically in Office 2008, an initiative the company claims is driven by Apple's user interface guidelines. The new release has more involved and detailed palettes than any previous versions, and adds an objects palette that allows access to iPhoto libraries and other standard Mac OS X media reference folders.

Also new to Office 2008 is an entirely new graphics layer dubbed "Office art 2.0": At its core, this is the same graphics engine used for Windows, purportedly guaranteeing pixel-for-pixel similarity between documents created in Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac OS X.

One of the benefits of Office Art 2.0 is smart Art, collections of graphic templates that can have colors, shapes and other properties applied automatically. These include cycle-type flowcharts, hierarchy elements and more.

Another benefit is a Mac-only feature in Word 2008 dubbed publishing layout view. Essentially, this function turns any Word document into a free-form canvas for laying out graphics and text elements. In practice, the feature looked remarkably like Steve Jobs' first presentation of iWeb. For instance, it can automatically resize, rotate and add modifications to images that are dragged and dropped into documents.

Office Art 2.0 also affords some other nifty Mac-only features. For instance, there are now rollover previews of drag and drop graphics. This means that when the user drags an image over a designated template spot, the image will automatically show as it would in the document (modifications, rotation, etc. applied) before actually being dropped.

Also new is a text overflow function -- click a button and you can automatically move text that overflows from one text box into another text box placed where you desire.

Again, Microsoft is assuring pixel-for-pixel document compatibility with the Windows version of Office 2007. So while Windows users will not have access to the same methods for accomplishing certain tasks, they will still be able to view changes exactly as they are made on a Mac

A few Entourage-specific functions were discussed. There is now a keystroke-accessible tool called My day. This a separate application that looks like a widget and has to-do lists, tasks and other information that can be manipulated and will synchronize live with the Entourage database.

When Steve Jobs presented the Leopard version of Mail.app he said "I live in Mail" -- one of the driving themes behind the centralized nature of the product. Interestingly enough, one of Microsoft presenter proclaimed "I live in Entourage." when presenting the software. Obviously, the theme of an e-mail driven lifestyle with periphery access to PIM (personal information manager) functions is popular.

Finally, Excel offers some new functionality that Microsoft intends to eliminate the "intimidation" some users feel when staring at a blank spreadsheet. Excel's elements gallery includes "Sheets" -- smart templates for balances, budgets, reports, invoices, etc. There are also column templates 'Check, payment, etc.' that will automatically recognize and enact appropriate functions rather than requiring users to hunt them down.

All in all, Office 2008 looks like an impressive and Mac-centric update -- not an unexpected occurrence from the largest Mac development house outside of Apple. Even without a slew of new features, two primary concerns, Intel-based Mac optimization and Office 2007 interoperability, will likely make this a must-upgrade for most Mac users.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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