Office for Mac - Office 2008 for Mac Review

The Wait Is Over: PowerPoint and Entourage

It came as no surprise that PowerPoint includes the same gallery elements found in Word and Excel. In addition to the Charts, SmartArt, and Word Art gallery elements found in the other Office applications, PowerPoint also has Slide Themes, Slide Layouts, Transitions, and Table Styles.

Unlike in the other Office applications, the gallery elements seem to serve a much more useful purpose in PowerPoint. There's nothing actually new in PowerPoint's ability to build a presentation, but the galleries deliver a better user interface that makes using PowerPoint a breeze, something I would never have said about earlier versions.

Even the floating palette, something I'm not overly fond of, works well in PowerPoint. Microsoft has done a good job of consolidating many of the toolbox functions into a single tabbed floating palette, making it much more useful and eliminating the clutter of multiple palette windows. Of course, this also means the palette's interface changes, depending on which tab you click on, but that's a small price to pay for a compact palette and extra screen real estate.

PowerPoint 2008 offers a number of improvements, but a few things are still disappointing. The process of embedding QuickTime movies into a presentation is improved, but manipulating the video during a presentation is still a chore. Path animation, the ability to define a path and then animate a slide or object moving along the path, something the Windows version of PowerPoint has had for some time, is still missing in the Mac version.

Entourage 2008 comes to the Mac with two major changes. Like the rest of Office 2008, Entourage is now a universal application, bringing native speed and performance to Intel Macs. The other big change is in the user interface. After years of looking like a Windows application, Entourage now finally looks and (mostly) behaves like a Mac application.

Entourage is primarily an email client, but it also has a well-integrated address book, calendar, notes, and tasks, something that Apple only recently started pulling together in its Mail application. The email-related features in Entourage 2008 have been tweaked and refined, but there aren't any drastic changes in the user experience. The Mail Rules remain some of the best available in email clients. Microsoft dropped its old advanced search system in favor of integrating Apple's Spotlight search feature, a much better system in my estimation.

One place where Entourage falls down is in filtering spam. While it catches a vast amount of spam, I saw more spam getting through Entourage than through Apple's Mail. On the plus side, Entourage includes an anti-phishing system that flags suspicious emails that may be attempts to acquire personal information. Phishing is becoming the dominant type of junk mail, so it's nice to see this capability.

Entourage 2008 provides a wealth of features, especially for individuals who want an integrated mail, calendar, and task system to help manage their busy schedule.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has been in the pipeline for quite some time. For the most part, this latest iteration is a winner, especially for Intel Mac users who have long suffered through using Office 2004 or even Office X.

Word, PowerPoint, and Entourage all provide enough features and capabilities to recommend them as updates to consider. The only sore sport in Office 2008 is Excel. While I liked Excel's new use of galleries, and the ease they bring to creating spreadsheets, I was disappointed in the new lack of support for VBA. When you need VBA support, you can run Excel 2004 or Excel X alongside Office 2008 without any problems, but the need to keep an older version of a program around for full compatibility is both noteworthy and irritating.

Office 2008 for Mac is the last major productivity application to go universal and become a native application for Intel Macs. With a few exceptions, it's been worth the wait.