Special Report:
Office 2008 for Mac OS X Preview
Cross-platform issues with the upcoming new version

New Office Mac to offer limitted compatiblity with Win Office 2007
January 9, 2007

Today, Microsoft announced that this year it will release Office 2008 for Mac OS X, an Intel-native version that will be compatible with the XML-based Office file formats of Office 2007 for Windows. The company also said that it will drop support of VBA script and macro support in the new version.

Office 2008 will include native support for the new.DOCX Word format and the .XLSX Excel format. The new version will also be the first Universal Binary Office, running natively on both Intel-based Macs and PowerPC Macs. Microsoft will ship Office 2008 during the second half of this year.

Microsoft also announced that it will also ship a file converter for  Mac OS X that will allow users of Office 2004 to translate between the old and new Office file formats. Currently, Panergy software offers a Mac OS X utility called DocXConverter (US$20) that can convert between .DOC and .DOCX formats.

The company said that PowerPoint 2008 will have better compatibility with PowerPoint 2007 for Windows, particularly with embedded images. A company spokesperson said that users could move a PowerPoint file between Mac and Windows versions of Office without losing graphics, a common problem with current versions off PowerPoint.

“Users should no longer see the big red X,” said a company spokesperson.

The company said that the compatibility is created by a new graphics rendering engine in PowerPoint 2008 that is essentially the same graphics engine in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows. 

Microsoft did not provide any details on Entourage 2008. A company spokesperson acknowledged that Entourage did not have the functionality of Outlook for Windows, but said the company had nothing to announce. Microsoft did say that Office 2008 will include a new application called My Day, which is a calendar viewer that displays a single day of appointments.

One notable change is the user interface, which adopts numerous Windows conventions, including aspects of the Aero interface of Windows Vista. This includes toolbars that are attached to document windows instead of the screen and Windows-like behavior in tabs and buttons. There are also a number of instances of Vista-like graphics, include the use of transparency and an increase in the use of 3-D interface elements.

Other new features include a new toolbar that embeds the Project Gallery in every document window. Excel has a new Ledger Sheet, a type of template available from the new Gallery. Word 2008 will include a new Publishing Layout View which includes page layout features such as linked text boxes that can be drawn anywhere on screen, similar to those in Adobe InDesign. (Each corner of a textbox is marked by a 3-D globe. It was not evident in our interview with Microsoft if this or other 3D interface elements served a functional purpose.)

MacTech to help with lack of VBA in Office Mac 2008
February 11, 2007

In a special April edition, MacTech Magazine will publish a 150-page guide to help users of the upcoming Office 2008 transition from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript. The multi-chapter guide will include examples for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage.

Microsoft will drop Visual Basic support from Office 2008 for Mac OS X, due later this year, thus forcing users of VBA scripts and marcos to switch to AppleScript. Writing in Macworld last December, Rob Griffiths said "Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite."

Griffiths' pointed out that organizations that upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac will lose the ability of both Mac and Windows to share the same macros in files, which are used in many organizations for file templates. This is a built-in incentive for organizations to stick with Office 2004 for Mac OS X.

Parting VBA scripts and macros to AppleScript will enable users to operate the automation of existing Office files, but Windows users will not have access to the scripts. MacTech Magazine's "Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript: MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition" will be available at the beginning of April. Subscribers will receive it, and a limited number of copies will be available on the newsstand.

For more on Office 2008 for Mac OS X, see our Office 2008 Report page.

Office 2008 for Mac: VBA a deal breaker for some
February 19, 2007

Several readers reacted to our report about Microsoft's plans to drop the cross-platform VBA script and macro support in the upcoming Office 2008 for Mac. Readers say that they'll stick with 2004 or use the Windows version in a virtual machine.

Greg Walker said simply "I will not buy Office without VBA scripting."

Joe Parker will stick with the current version:

There's, not a chance that I’ll upgrade to Office 2008 without VBA support. I’ll happily drudge along with Office 2004. Pass my thanks to Microsoft.

Although continuing to use Office 2004 retains cross-platform macro compatibility, it does not have native file compatibility with Office 2007 for Windows and the OpenXML file format. Neema Aghamohammadi will get around this by using the Windows version in Parallels:

I will tell you how the slow drift away from cross-platform parity will affect me: I'm switching to Office 2003 using Parallels. In fact, there's a discussion of this in the Ars Technica forums in the Mac forum.

… You get full Outlook/Exchange compatibility + Access at this cost. Performance is stunning in comparison to MacOffice 2004 on any Intel Mac with greater than 1GB of RAM.

(CrossOver can also run Microsoft Office for Windows, as can the VMware Fusion beta.)

New Microsoft beta converter turns Word .docx files into RTF, but can't save to .docx