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Microsoft Office 2008 is the latest release of Microsoft’s productivity suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, email and calendaring tools.

Office 2008 features a radical interface overhaul, which combines the best of Office’s previous features, such as the Formatting Palette, with a very Mac OS X-style way of working and some innovations. It also brings native Intel processor compatibility, which required a complete overhaul of the code base.

But, there are some losses, too. Visual Basic for Applications, the scripting system used by many enterprises to automate workflows, has been dropped, to the consternation of many business customers. And Office 2008 requires at least a PowerPC G4 processor; as in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, G3-based iMac and iBooks are not supported. VirtualPC has been dropped.

Competition

Microsoft Office has dominated the business and education productivity market for the past decade. Old competitors such as WordPerfect, Persuasion, and Lotus Jazz have fallen by the wayside, and niche players such as Mellel and Nisus Writer have survived but are no competition against Microsoft’s marketshare and marketing supremacy.

Over the past four years, since Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (“Mac BU”), released Office 2004, the competitive landscape has changed significantly. Apple’s iWork suite has gained a spreadsheet application, Numbers, while Pages has become a viable word processor. At a quarter the price of Microsoft Office, iWork has pressured Office from the low end with great graphics and outstanding usability.

The OpenOffice suite provides a free clone of Microsoft Office, if not much in the way of innovation or Mac integration. (NeoOffice has made the strongest effort to create a Mac version of OpenOffice.)

Meanwhile, Web applications have become viable alternatives for many people. Google Docs, for example, provides basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities. While primitive compared to the rich interfaces of traditional Mac and PC applications, these tools work from any computer with an Internet connection. Moreover, the online document sharing features change the way users work in very fundamental ways. Emailing documents becomes irrelevant when you can simply grant a colleague access to your documents folder online.

With price pressure from the low end, and compelling collaboration features available from new online applications threatening the very model of Mac/PC-based software, Microsoft’s Mac BU faces its most serious challenge in a decade.

Features

As with the previous version, Office 2008 is available in three versions. The “Student and Teacher” edition has been renamed “Home and Student Edition”, and still includes three license codes. The standard edition is targeted at business users, and includes nearly a hundred Automator Actions and sample Workflows, plus support for Microsoft Exchange servers.

The most expensive Professional edition has been replaced with “Special Media Edition”; instead of Virtual PC, it includes Microsoft Expression Media, which was formerly iView Media Pro before Microsoft’s buyout. iView, a media management and presentation program, had a loyal following among designers and photographers who made it an integral part of their workflow.

All Office 2008 versions also include the free MSN Messenger client.

User Interface Overhaul

Office’s new look is immediately apparent. Gone are the floating toolbars we’ve had since Word 5 (or before). Instead, an integrated, Leopard-style toolbar adorns each document window, offering a limited selection of the most frequently used functions. It’s obvious that a lot of work has gone into de-cluttering the interface (but all your old toolbars are still available if you want them; just go to the View -> Toolbars menu).

Office has always been extremely powerful, but many of its features were previously hidden behind obscure menu titles. Rather than copy Office 2007′s controversial “Ribbon” interface, the Mac BU has created an Elements Gallery feature (more on that below) and intelligently merged the old Toolbox with the Formatting Palette into a very useful new inspector-style Toolbox panel.

Development focused on creating “discoverable” interfaces, and we think this will go a long way to helping new users become “power users.”

Elements Gallery

The “Elements Gallery” is a new way to quickly browse and insert document objects, and even styles or themes. Located just below the toolbar, a series of tabs each expands to reveal a visual gallery of objects and styles that you can add to your document.

These visual representations of Office’s increasingly crowded and confusing menus are just the thing for helping less sophisticated users take advantage of Office’s powerful features. Experienced users with established habits can still access all the usual (and new) features in the same ways, however, via Insert, Format, and Tools menus.

The Elements Gallery includes charts, new SmartArt Graphics, and newly-enhanced WordArt. These are available across Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but each of them also has application-specific features.

Word’s Document Elements include cover pages, tables of contents, pre-styled headers and footers, and bibliographies. Excel features a number of handy templates for budgets, checkbooks, invoices, reports, stock portfolios and other common financial tools. PowerPoint’s Elements Gallery not only offers useful new objects, but also provides a great visual gallery of pre-designed slide templates and layouts, manages transitions, and inserts styled data tables.

Entourage, not being a document editor like the rest of the Office suite, has no Elements Gallery.

SmartArt

Office 2008′s other flashy new tool is “SmartArt”, which is designed to help you create info-graphics in a hurry. From within the Elements Gallery, a variety of list, cycle, process flow, hierarchy, relationship, matrix and pyramid graphics are ready to illustrate your concepts.

You can edit SmartArt text directly, but we found it quicker to use the Aperture-style, “HUD” panel to add new items and create hierarchies.

SmartArt is extremely handy, but we foresee a lot of confusing documents and presentations as people experiment with this new tool. Make sure your graphic choices fit the information you are presenting!

Integrated Toolbox

The Formatting Palette, introduced in Office v.X (a.k.a. Office 2001), received a major overhaul, both visual and functional, as it was combined with the old Toolbox into a new, unified panel for Office 2008. Both old and new tools can be found in an array of buttons at the top.

The default (and most used) panel is the Formatting Palette, which looks both larger and clearer than its immediate predecessor. Appearances deceive, though — a reduction in borders between elements increases their visual presence in the same space, which improves usability on the increasingly high-pixel-density screens found on newer Macs, without consuming more real estate.

The various formatting panes are largely the same, but there is a new “Document Theme” item at the bottom. This pane provides a range of attractive color schemes and typeface combinations that you can apply to a document for a quick re-styling.

The Symbol browser is much larger, making it easier to locate and insert special typographic symbols. The Object Palette now includes not only a selection of shapes, but also an integrated clip art browser that includes a variety of photos complete with alpha channels.

And the entirely new Photo browser displays your iPhoto Library, or folders full of pictures from elsewhere on your Mac or local network. (Oddly, Aperture is not supported, despite its XML export, which any application can read.)

Reference Tools still include thesaurus and dictionary functions but now add integrated Encarta Encyclopedia lookup (no longer using a separate web browser). Wikipedia would be nice, but since students should reference verified sources, Encarta really is a better choice.

The tools also include bilingual dictionaries (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese), web search (using MSN Search), and even a translation service. Unfortunately, the Translation service didn’t work for us. Word reported “Office cannot connect to the Internet” despite successfully performing other online lookups.

A new Citations Palette for Word vastly simplifies management of citations and bibliographies. In previous versions of Word, you had to know that citation management was hidden behind two layers of menus and several clicks, and, even then, the interface was arcane at best.

The new panel makes it a snap to add new citations, insert them into the text, and generate a bibliography. While dedicated products such as EndNote still excel at managing tens of thousands of citations across dozens of projects, as required by professional scholars, Word’s new Citations manager is a godsend for students.

Preferences

The preference windows of each Office suite have been redesigned to look like Apple’s System Preferences. Word goes the furthest of the suite, with twenty preference screens divided into groups: “Authoring and Proofing Tools”, “Output and Sharing”, and “Personal Settings”.

Excel has fifteen screens, grouped into “Authoring”, “Formulas and Lists”, and “Sharing and Privacy”. PowerPoint has no groupings, instead listing the screens along the toolbar — a curious break from the pattern.

Word and Excel also include a Spotlight-style text search like System Preferences.

Although they look like normal preference windows, the Preferences windows have no close box; instead you still must click “OK” or “Cancel”.

Another oddity is that document-specific settings – such as per-document security, view, and spelling/grammar – are still mixed in with application preferences. We would have expected this terrible practice to be excised by now, but no such luck.

At least the Security pane for Word and Excel now gives you the option to exclude personal information from document properties on save. But this feature is missing from PowerPoint — yet another strange inconsistency in the otherwise-thoughtful interface update.

Graphics and Text Rendering

Microsoft says that Office 2008 has a newly overhauled graphics engine. It’s quite obvious in the flashy animation used throughout Office 2008, but we also noticed a change in text rendering between Word 2004 and Word 2008:

Click to view 3x enlargement

Line lengths have slightly contracted, but it doesn’t appear to affect text wrapping when documents are exchanged between Word 2004 and 2008. (Word may still warn you that text wrap may change when saving as a Word 97-2004 file.)

Office’s traditionally wonky zoom has been fixed at last. In all previous versions of Office we’ve used, setting the document enlargement in 25% increments resulted in weird letter-spacing within words and has never been very readable. (We used 33% increments, instead, to avoid the strangeness of the preset choices.)

Office 2008 gets it right at last – 125%, 75% and 175% zooms are no longer bizarre-looking. Now they’re as good as Apple’s iWork has been since its inception.

Word

After the interface changes, Word’s biggest new feature is “Publishing Layout View.” Responding directly to the challenge of Apple’s Pages, Publishing Layout provides a remarkably complete toolset for basic desktop publishing tasks. From creating and applying master page layouts, to making and linking text boxes, to adding rich graphics, Word has gone from nearly impossible to incredibly easy to use. It even shows alignment guides like Pages and Keynote do, and supports type ligatures.

At first glance, the layout tools lag in a few areas – resizing images, for example, shows a live translucent preview, but there is no live text re-wrapping, as Pages does. However, these limits serve to keep the tools usable on slower Macs, a sensible design decision.

Like Pages, Publishing Layout creates an entirely different document vs. the standard Print Layout. Page layout and word processing are treated as two different tasks, and you cannot switch back and forth between them, even though both Print and Publishing Layouts look like printed pages on-screen! We had hoped that Word 2008 might improve upon this multiple personality disorder in Pages, but, alas, it was not to be.

Publishing Layout View has a special Elements Gallery distinct from Print Layout’s “Document Elements”, providing, instead, an array of attractively-designed templates, including newsletters, brochures, flyers, invitations, programs, postcards, catalogs, awards, menus, posters and signs, and even CD labels.

While iWork has an edge in sheer design elegance, Word’s templates seem better chosen for common home and school tasks, with designs for theater programs, award certificates, flyers and newsletters. Small businesses are covered too, with templates ranging from menu designs to product catalogs to marketing postcards. Combined with Word’s new “Document Theme” palette (complementary color and type schemes), users will be up and running in a hurry.

A whimsical, yet pleasant, feature is Publishing Layout’s background. Instead of the pale teal color that Office 2008 uses for the Print Layout view, a rich oak wood texture behind your document makes it feel like you’re working on a well-made drawing table. You can select from an array of wood, leather, paper and metal surfaces — even brushed aluminum or titanium to match your PowerBook, or a metal grill like the Mac Pro’s. It’s a little thing, but it made us smile. (We wish we could do this also to the Print Layout view!)

Word’s Notebook view gets a visual update, too. Five new Notebook styles, each with and without rings, provide attractive new choices that are easier on our eyes than Word 2004′s were. The same choice of backgrounds is available as in Publishing Layout view. The other tools are basically unchanged, and as useful as ever: the Scribble pencil lets you sketch and draw connections between note areas, and the audio tool records, using your Mac’s built-in microphone, and lets you replay sections of the recording matching note bullet items.

Excel

Over its twenty-three year history, Excel has become immensely powerful. Short of a radical re-envisioning of how spreadsheets work (such as Apple’s Numbers), it seems like there’s just not much left to add to Excel.

Excel 2008′s main improvements are its new Formula Builder panel, formula autocomplete, and pre-designed ledger sheets. (Excel 2008 retains its old formula bar, the only floating toolbar remaining in Office 2008.)

Formula Builder makes it easy to find and use functions from Excel’s extensive library, functioning as a combination help system and wizard. You can type values or cell references directly or click in your worksheet to insert cell references and ranges. Formula Builder inserts the formula into the worksheet, as you construct it, and provides a live calculation preview when the functions have enough values to evaluate. After years of struggling through Excel’s help system to find the precise formula we needed, Formula Builder was a welcome addition.

A related improvement is function autocomplete. When typing in formulas, Excel provides a list of possible matching functions. Selecting one is as simple as arrowing down through the list and pressing return or tab. Programmers take code completion for granted in modern development environments, and Excel 2008′s new autocomplete feature brings this functionality to ordinary users.

As mentioned in our overview of Elements Gallery, Excel 2008 includes a variety of pre-built ledger sheets, which help new users get up and running with common tasks and provide some limited customization of column fields. They won’t replace dedicated tools such as QuickBooks and Quicken, but they’re a big improvement over paper bookkeeping.

PowerPoint

Much like Excel, PowerPoint has modest enhancements, once you look past the new Elements Gallery and updated Toolbox. Animating slide elements is much faster and easier now, thanks to a new “Custom Animation” tool in the Toolbox, and Keynote-style dynamic guides make aligning objects on-screen easy.

PowerPoint 2008′s fancy text effects are a mixed blessing. It’s easy to go overboard!

Presenter tools (for dual-screen setups) have been tweaked, with a new clock option added, and navigation arrows are now side-by-side, reducing mousing. The Apple Remote can be used to navigate forward and back during a presentation, including triggering slide builds.

In addition to PowerPoint’s existing export to movie and web formats, PowerPoint 2008 includes a “Save as Pictures” option. This is intended to send slides to iPhoto, and from there to an iPod for presentation on a television or projector. This is another nice touch; users were already doing this, but now it’s quick and easy. Of course, fancy animations aren’t saved in those pictures — but this is probably a blessing, given the distracting over-use of animation we’ve seen in presentations over the years!

Office’s new graphics engine shows off in PowerPoint’s new templates — drop shadows and reflections can be found everywhere. The “Slide Themes” gallery does not include templates that were installed with Office 2004, but you can apply them as custom themes if you saved your old Office 2004 application folder.

The new PowerPoint slide templates, as in Word, are professionally designed and very usable. Some are whimsical, but most are far more elegant and professional than those found in previous incarnations of PowerPoint.

Entourage

Entourage 2008 updates Microsoft’s email client and project manager for the Mac. Combining email, calendaring, contact management and task/project tracking, Entourage is very powerful, but like Excel and PowerPoint, it focuses on the user interface and keeps new features to a minimum. We’re not Entourage users ourselves — having tried it and returned to other clients such as Apple Mail, Thunderbird and venerable Eudora. But a quick look at Entourage 2008 is encouraging.

The new “My Day” feature provides at-a-glance reference to appointments and tasks, even if Entourage is closed, and in Entourage itself, tasks are consolidated in one to-do list. The calendar features the ability to add travel time before and after appointments, and they display as shaded areas before and after a meeting in day and week views. You can also color-code appointments by category, and you can create new appointments by dragging in the calendar (old hat to iCal users, admittedly).

The overall interface is cleaned up and streamlined compared to Entourage 2004. We always found the old version to be visually cluttered and confusing. While the interface hasn’t quite gotten a clean sweep, it’s much streamlined and we’re no longer put off merely looking at it.

One thing we’d like to see is Entourage’s calendar, tasks and contacts integrated into Leopard, so other applications could access them. It might help Microsoft win a few more converts from iCal and Address Book, but, quite frankly, we want the fabulous “My Day” feature to work hand-in-hand with iCal and iPhone!

The other thing we’d like to see is for Entourage to abandon its monolithic email database. This file, which can grow to gigabytes in size, does not back up as efficiently as file-per-mailbox or file-per-message storage schemes (as used by Thunderbird, Eudora and Apple Mail). This might also help manage the database corruption issue that has long plagued Entourage users. Until then, users will have to find their own ways to efficiently back up the Entourage database; some good ideas have been proposed recently in MacInTouch Reader Reports.

Help System

Office 2008′s help system deserves special mention. As with previous versions, the Mac BU has eschewed Mac OS X’s system help in favor of a custom system. The new help system acts much like Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s help system does — except it’s faster, better looking and easier to navigate. Like Tiger and Leopard, the Office 2008 help system goes online to get the latest help files, but without Tiger’s painful delays. You can explicitly toggle between online and offline help; they even have different colored headers so you know which you are viewing. And search returns results nearly instantly.

(Office 2008 help also has what may be the last surviving Aqua Drawer in any mainstream application, housing the table of contents and search results.)

Automation

Automation is a key issue for many business users. Microsoft has dropped Visual Basic for Applications from Office 2008 (see Issues, below, for a complete discussion). Office 2004 already had a very rich AppleScript Dictionary; Office 2008 Standard and Special Media Editions add nearly a hundred Automator Actions and sample workflows.

AppleScript provides a Mac-native automation option, but its quirky syntax and object handling have prevented widespread usage by ordinary customers. Automator, introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, wraps common AppleScript tasks in a graphical interface that makes it easy to build workflows. Office’s new Actions make it easier to create Mac-specific workflows that use Microsoft Office. They don’t provide the same flexibility as AppleScript, but it is now possible to automate some Office features without being an AppleScript guru.

(There is a known problem with Office 2008, documented by Microsoft: “Running Automator workflows and AppleScripts from the Office script menu is not currently supported under Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard).” Oops.)

Performance

We tested Office 2008 on three Macs: an aluminum PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz, 1 GB RAM), a first-generation iMac Core Duo (20″, 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM), and a Mac Pro (quad 2.66 GHz, 6 GB RAM).

Our “seat of the pants” impression on Intel harwdare was a general speed up in Word and Excel — unsurprising, since it’s a native, Universal application. But PowerPoint actually felt much slower to us on the iMac; we could out-type the computer on slides with fancy backgrounds.

On our PowerBook G4, Office 2008 feels a little slower. Not unusable or even annoying, but not quite as snappy as Office 2004 was.

A particular weak spot is embedding Office objects. When we used “Paste Special” to embed a section of an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document, it took a long time for the paste to complete. And after that, clicking the newly inserted object resulted in long delays before the selection handles appeared and we could edit wrap options and borders, and seemed to slow down screen redraws of that page.

MacTech has conducted extensive performance testing, with details in its March 2008 issue. They performed more than 2,500 “real world” speed tests of Office 2008 and 2004 and found that, for Intel users, Office 2008 ran 28% faster than Office 2004 did in Rosetta. But on a PowerBook G4, MacTech found that Office 2008 applications averaged 32% slower than Office 2004 — except for graphics tests, which ran 30% faster!

On our 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4, Office 2008 is certainly usable, but it’s not the speed win that it is on Intel. The slowest processor supported by Office 2008 is a 500 MHz G4, but we would advise against running it on such a slow CPU, unless you specifically require Office 2007 file format compatibility and have no other options.

Office appears to take advantage of multiple cores well for some tasks. When browsing a folder with 1,700 images (and 75 thumbnails per screen) in the Object Palette, Word’s CPU usage jumped to 185% on our test iMac Core Duo. However, typing was very unresponsive while the thumbnails loaded.

Memory Use

Minimum memory requirements are double that of Office 2004, both in Microsoft’s recommendations and in our actual measurements. When we opened Word 2004 and 2008, each for the first time, Word 2004′s real memory use was 94 MB, while Word 2008′s real memory was 194 MB (figures as reported by Activity Monitor). Both used more memory as we opened documents.

Since PowerPoint uses Excel to build its charts and edit chart data, you’ll want to ensure you have enough memory for both to run at the same time.

While testing Word, we thought we managed to find a pathological case of memory use, but it turned out not to be as bad as we thought. On a Mac Pro with 6 GB of memory, browsing an iPhoto library of about ten thousand photos in the Object Palette caused Word’s memory use to balloon steadily, to 250, 300, 450, 500 MB… growing steadily until we stopped browsing new photos.

But, doing the same thing on an iMac Core Duo with 2 GB of RAM didn’t cause as much ballooning. Word topped out under 300 MB of memory use (even when we threw thousands of extra pictures at it), and free system memory remained steady at about 150 MB. And after leaving the Object Palette’s photo pane, memory usage dropped back to normal. Word seems happy to consume as much system memory is available for caching pictures, but also seems to limit itself in some intelligent ways, and release memory when done. This was a pleasant surprise.

Compatibility

Office 2008 requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher, or Leopard 10.5 and higher, running on no less than a 500-MHz G4 with 512 MB of RAM. Based on our testing, we recommend at least 1 GB of system RAM and a PowerPC G4 processor running at 1 GHz or higher.

With the loss of VBA support, some third-party extensions to Office may not work any more. (The WordFast translation tool, for example, is reportedly incompatible with Office 2008.)

File format

For many people, Office 2004 still works fine, but an increasing stream of new “Open XML” documents from colleagues using Office 2007 is forcing the issue. Microsoft’s Mac BU provided a free document converter for Office 2004 and earlier users, and Apple’s iWork ’08 seems happy to open .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files, but neither of these solutions preserves all formatting intact in all cases, leaving Office 2008 as the only sure way to view the document as it was authored.

The yet-to-be-finalized Open XML format has been a source of some controversy. In theory, the XML-based document should be readable and writable by any application. In practice, however, a truly compliant engine does not actually exist; Office 2007 and 2008 implement a proprietary variant of the specification.

Microsoft has already documented some file exchange issues. Despite using the same document format — at least in theory — some objects created in Office 2008 for Mac may not be editable, or even displayed, in Office 2007 for Windows!

Microsoft offers the following notes about Excel 2008 and PowerPoint 2008:

Some objects created in Office 2008 for Mac cannot be edited in Office for Windows
Due to an issue in Windows XP and Windows Vista, the following object types cannot be edited in Microsoft Office for Windows: Microsoft Equation, Microsoft Excel 97-2004 Sheet, Microsoft Excel Chart, Microsoft Graph Chart, Microsoft Organization Chart, Microsoft Word 97-2004 Document. If you are prompted to “reinstall the server application” when you attempt to edit one of these object types, disregard the alert.

Some objects created in Office 2008 for Mac might not display correctly when opened in Office for Windows
Due to an issue in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the following object types might display as a blank box when opened in Word 2007, Excel 2007, or PowerPoint 2007 for Windows: Microsoft Equation, Microsoft Excel 97-2004 Sheet, Microsoft Excel Chart, Microsoft Graph Chart, Microsoft Organization Chart, Microsoft Word 97-2004 Document. To work around this issue, save the object as a picture, and then replace the object with the saved picture. To save an object as a picture, in Office 2008, hold down CONTROL and click the object, and then click Save as Picture.

And the following notes about Word 2008:

Equations saved in Word 2007 for Windows are not supported in Word 2008 for Mac. The equations will be preserved so that they display correctly in Word 2007, but will appear as placeholders in Word 2008.

(The irony here is that Microsoft championed the RTF format as an application-neutral document exchange file format in the 80′s, then later created a new, forward-compatible file format for Office 97, and now that this format is a de facto standard that most applications can read and write consistently, Microsoft is replacing it with yet another file format — yet can’t consistently implement that format themselves.)

Document file size

One of the claims Microsoft makes for the new file format is that the files it creates are smaller than the old format. However, that was not borne out in our testing:

Issues

There are a few oversights in Office 2008′s interface overhaul. For example, the Elements Gallery is not optional, so even though you can hide the toolbar by clicking the Finder-style toggle lozenge in the title bar, the Elements Gallery tabs are omnipresent. And while Save As uses a standard Mac OS X sheet, the Open dialog is a modal window.

The new Toolbox and Elements Gallery are great, but as one digs into the advanced settings for objects and styles, the same tired old Office dialog boxes with the same bizarre arrangements we’ve tolerated since Word 6 return. Long time Word users may welcome the familiar old tools, but most of those tools remain unconscionably complex, not to mention lacking live previews we’ve come to expect from modern Mac apps, that Office itself uses elsewhere.

Over the days we’ve worked with Office 2008, we’ve experienced some odd display problems. Layer glitches are common: Office 2008 apps don’t always seem to be aware they’ve come to the foreground, or they respond to typing and mouse clicks but remain obscured behind other application windows. This may be a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard problem, as we’ve occasionally seen this happen with other applications in Leopard — but not with anything like this regularity.

Office 2008 also seems confused by Leopard’s Spaces. Sometimes when we click a Dock icon, the Office 2008 application we clicked comes to the foreground, but its sole active window remains in another Space.

And at least two or three times a day, we switch to Word but the Toolbox is a blank grey box until we click inside it.

Crashes

Of greater concern than display glitches is PowerPoint’s instability. While Word 2008 has remained crash-free during our use, Excel 2008 crashed once, and PowerPoint 2008 has crashed with some regularity. We haven’t lost any data yet, but until Microsoft issues some bug fixes, frequent backups will be vital to early adopters of PowerPoint 2008.

This also highlights the lack of a basic feature in PowerPoint and Excel: unlike Word, neither has an option to create a backup of the previous version on Save. And while Word and Excel periodically save “Autorecover” temporary files to guard against data loss from crashes, PowerPoint still doesn’t, after all these years.

Visual Basic for Applications

In a highly controversial move, Microsoft’s Mac BU chose to remove Visual Basic for Applications from Office 2008 — meaning all existing VBA-based macros will no longer run. VBA is widely used in enterprises to automate internal processes. Mac BU developers have blogged openly about this issue, and while their decision is unpopular, at least we know why it was made.

Mac BU Software Design Lead Erik Schwiebert has written the most about the challenges developers faced in converting VBA to the Intel architecture. Briefly, the old VBA system is heavily dependent upon thousands of tiny fragments of hand-built PowerPC code written over a decade ago, strung together and adjusted on the fly using techniques specific to PowerPC chips and CodeWarrior’s compiler. VBA is really a rudimentary compiler — one of the most challenging kinds of software to write. Rebuilding the VBA system to work with Intel chips and the frequently-changing GCC compiler used by Xcode would have added two years to Office 2008′s development, according to Microsoft — just to re-implement VBA, with no improvements.

Faced with two years of work simply to maintain the status quo, and not improve the product in any measurable way, the Mac BU chose to drop VBA.

Microsoft provides guides for porting Office 2004 and Office 2008 macros to AppleScript on their web site. But, MacInTouch readers have already discovered that this is not a complete solution. Significantly, Excel and Word 2008 cannot trigger AppleScripts from buttons, or run custom macros that evaluate and process data. This means Excel- and Word-based forms are dead in the water, and users with libraries of custom macros that analyze data are out of luck.

Despite being given a year and a half’s warning that this was coming, automation solutions for advanced users are in short supply. These are the users that were effectively locked into Microsoft Office by their libraries of documents and macros; many are now looking for an Office replacement.

(It’s worth noting that the OpenOffice project has a VBA interoperability effort underway. It’s incomplete at the moment, but this may provide a viable option in the future.)

There were reports that VBA had been end-of-lifed in Office for Windows as well, prompted by Microsoft telling its users to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office. Microsoft’s Joseph Chirilov has responded that there are no plans to remove VBA from Excel for Windows, writing “We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers.”

Excel 4.0 Macros

There appears to be some confusion about the scope of VBA’s removal. Old Excel 4.0 Macros are not based on VBA, and if they have not been ported to VBA, they still run under Office 2008. But, as with Office 2004 and Office v.X (2001), Office 2008 cannot record new XLM macros.

Conclusions

Considered as a list of new features, Office 2008 is an evolutionary improvement upon Office 2004. But in terms of discoverability and usability, it’s a clear win.

Office 2008′s new Elements Gallery and integrated Toolbox make the suite’s sometimes-bewildering array of features easy to find and easy to use. Microsoft marketing often talks about making “Mac-like” applications; Office 2008 is the most Mac-like version of Office since Word 5.1.

The loss of VBA support may be a deal-breaker for some users, but Office’s rich AppleScript dictionaries may help mitigate the pain. Cross-platform compatibility isn’t quite as good as promised, but it’s already proven a better option than file converters, as we’ve exchanged XML-based Word and Excel files with Office 2007 users.

VirtualPC has been dropped from the Office suite; it appears Microsoft has no interest in competing with Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, or Apple’s free Boot Camp. (VMware has recently released an update to their Importer beta which can import VirtualPC 7 machine images.)

Microsoft Expression Media (née iView Media Pro) is added in the top product bundle, and it seems like a good choice for creative professionals, although we haven’t yet tested the Microsoft version.

Business users will want to migrate soon, if only to ease document exchange, but some will need a plan for dealing with legacy VBA macros. This may be as simple as not uninstalling Office 2004. (We always keep old versions of applications on hand in case compatibility issues crop up.) And with a steady increase of web-based workflow systems in modern enterprises replacing proprietary software, losing VBA ultimately may be a non-issue.

With the “Home and Student Edition” so affordably priced and three licenses included, and a greatly simplified yet powerful interface, we expect Office will do well in the consumer markets. But, it requires a moderately quick computer to run well; Macs older than three or four years may not fare well.

Microsoft Office for Mac has risen to the challenge of its competition, after iWork raised the bar for graphics and simplicity. It’s hard to compete with the free OpenOffice suite, but OpenOffice still mimics old versions of Office for Windows, and Office 2008 is more innovative than ever. And while Google Docs provides a fascinating alternative to traditional software, Mac Office shows off what you can do with all the power of a modern Mac underlying your application.

Office’s capabilities are vast, but until now much of it has been hidden among a maze of menus and byzantine dialog boxes. Office 2008 brings it out, and shows it off.