Product Description

For media-savvy Mac users to achieve more & simplify digital asset management. For professionals working with libraries of images, video, music, and digital assets, we’ve combined the reinvented Office 2008 for Mac experience with Expression Media. Includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, Microsoft Server Exchange Support, Automator Actions for Workflows in Microsoft Office, Microsoft Expression Media (formerly iView).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 45586G
• Released on: 2008-01-15
• Platforms: Mac, Mac OS X
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 15.60" h x 62.40" w x 87.60" l, .35 pounds

Features

• Streamlined user interface runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs
• Open XML file formats, the Office Art graphics engine, and other features that result in compatibility and file fidelity
• Drag-and-drop digital asset management, batch conversion and tagging, and built-in archiving and backup capabilities help you manage over 100,000 files and hundreds of format types across multiple storage devices
• Automator Actions for Workflows in Microsoft Office enables you to automate Office 2008 with more than 70 pre-defined actions built to simplify your work and extend your productivity
• Includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, Microsoft Server Exchange Support, Automator Actions for Workflows in Microsoft Office

Amazon.com
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition. The power of the Office 2008 applications plus Expression Media, the powerful asset management tool to visually catalog, organize and present all of your digital assets. Simplify your work and visualize your success.

Simplify Your Work
Your presentation will make an impact. Your documents will be professional. Your analysis will be insightful. And Office 2008 will be there.
The latest version of the industry standard for productivity software on the Macintosh platform, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is more powerful and easier to use. Office 2008 combines Microsoft Word for Mac, Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac, Microsoft Excel for Mac, Microsoft Entourage for Mac, and Microsoft Messenger for Mac and lets you easily create high-impact documents and seamlessly share your ideas with others, whether they are on the Mac or Windows platform.

What's New in Office for Mac?

• Universal versions of the most popular productivity applications on the Macintosh platform (Universal applications run natively on Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs.)
• Microsoft Office for Mac natively supports the Open XML file formats for compatibility with Windows-based 2007 Microsoft Office products.
• A redesigned user interface and powerful new tools for simplifying work, creating great looking documents, and exchanging ideas and information with others.

Highlights of Office 2008 for Mac

• Office 2008 is a Universal Binary, was built by Mac users for Mac users, and includes many features which take advantage of underlying technologies of the Macintosh platform.
• Office 2008 uses Open XML file formats for compatibility with Windows-based 2007 Microsoft Office products. XML file formats help reduce the risk of lost information due to damaged or corrupted files and also result in smaller file sizes--up to 75 percent smaller than comparable binary documents. Office 2008 for Mac is backward-compatible with earlier file formats and users can continue to use the older .doc, .xls, and .ppt binary formats.
• Elements Gallery is the foundation of the new user interface, and gives easy access to the most commonly used tools and templates. With the new UI, you'll harness the capabilities of Office for Mac more easily than ever before.
• Office 2008 includes OfficeArt, the powerful graphics engine also used in the Windows-based Office 2007 products. You get great cross-platform file fidelity and easy access to stunning visual and graphic effects.
• Your words will make an impact with the modern styling of SmartArt graphics, which makes transforming text and bulleted lists into professional diagrams and graphics one-click easy.
• A new Themes capability simplifies the process of applying a consistent look and feel across documents. Easily apply a complete set of colors, fonts, and effects to your Office 2008 documents, and change them as easily as changing your mind.
• Automator Actions for Workflows in Microsoft Office enables you to automate Office 2008 with more than 70 pre-defined actions built to simplify your work and extend your productivity. (Available in Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition.)

Entourage 2008, the hub of Office 2008, helps it to happen, one task at a time.

Enjoy powerful new tools, over 100 designer templates, rich themes, and an intuitive user interface in Word 2008.

Entourage 2008
Your e-mails will spark ideas, you'll schedule meetings where creativity abounds. Entourage 2008, the hub of Office 2008, helps it to happen, one task at a time.

• My Day keeps you connected to the action. Schedules, tasks, and priorities in one easy, standalone interface. Time will have no choice but to be well-managed.
• Use color-coded categories, status indicators, and flexible To-Do list management humble even the most hectic schedules.
• Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2008 Special Media Edition enable users to access their Microsoft Exchange server accounts with Entourage.
• Improved Junk E-Mail filtering capabilities and phishing protection tools help shield your inbox from the scourge of junk. Your inbox will breathe a sigh of relief.
• Projects submit to your superior management skills when you unleash the power of Project Center, With project details like e-mail messages, documents, schedules, and contacts in one convenient place, Project Center helps keep your information--and your stress--under control.

Word 2008
Powerful new tools, over 100 designer templates, rich themes, and an intuitive user interface in Word 2008 will help you to make your ideas look as good as they are.

• When you turn blah into brilliant, Publishing Layout View will elevate the way you think about Word 2008. This new specialized and customizable workspace lets users create incredibly rich documents such as newletters, flyers and brochures without a degree in design.
• Great looking document construction won't require a hard hat. New Templates, Themes, and Document Elements like cover pages and bibliographies make creating professional-looking output a snap.
• Your words will make an impact with the modern styling of SmartArt, which makes transforming text into high-quality graphics and diagrams as easy as one click.
• Dynamic Guides will help you keep all of your words and graphics in line and on point.
• Mass mailings will have a personal touch and Word 2008 Mail Merge Manager will guide you step by easy step.

Inspire your audience's imagination with compelling visuals and engaging layout in PowerPoint 2008.

Analyze, share, and manage your data, and easily create persuasive charts and thought-provoking graphs for powerful results with Excel 2008.

PowerPoint 2008
Your presentation is a story. PowerPoint 2008 will illustrate it. Inspire your audience's imagination with compelling visuals and engaging layout.

• Great ideas will get their graphic due with SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint 2008. Start with a blank slide or a bulleted list, and, with a click of a button, you'll have a stunning chart, table, map, or diagram.
• Designer Themes help you give your presentation a creative look, simply and quickly.
• The new Object Palette allows quick access to all your shapes, art, symbols, and pictures--including iPhoto files--in one easy-to-access space.
• Dynamic Guides will help you place and resize your graphic element to create professional-looking presentations in a snap.
• You'll lay out custom designs to showcase your unique content with custom layout capabilities in PowerPoint 2008.
• PowerPoint 2008 integration with Apple Remote Control lets you concentrate on your words, not your keyboard. Now control your presentation and engage your audience unleashed from the podium.

  Excel 2008
  It's a numbers game. With Excel 2008, analyze, share, and manage your data, and easily create persuasive charts and thought-provoking graphs for powerful results.

  • Ledger Sheets in Excel 2008 make tracking finances, inventories, even invoices and portfolios easy with preformulated spreadsheets and automatic calculations.
  • Charting improvements artfully convey the message your data is telling. You'll see your numbers in a whole new way.
  • The new prebuilt functions tackle the most common tasks and make creating error-free complex conditional formulas easier.
  • Quick access to formulas makes functions more functional with Formula Builder in Excel 2008.
  • Your data will know virtually no limits. Excel 2008 now supports over 16,000 columns and over 1 million rows.
  • Whether you're an Excel expert or a complete novice, Excel 2008 Formula AutoComplete simplifies your calculations by providing a dynamic pop-up menu so you can select and complete your formula.

  Messenger for Mac
  Convenience is the name of the game for Mac users who want to communicate instantly with family, friends and colleagues from one convenient place. Messenger for Mac is now a Universal application, and gives you more ways to share what's on your mind or on your plate.

  Use Messenger for Mac to instantly check the status of project team members, streamline workflow by sending documents directly from Word, or offer questions or comments on document changes instantly.

  • Yahoo! Interoperability will allow personal users to connect and message with Yahoo! Messenger for Mac users.
  • Your intentions will never again be in doubt when you create your own custom emoticons in Messenger for Mac.
  • Spelling Checker is now included in Messenger for Mac.
  • Let the world know your tastes when you display your iTunes selection with the new "What I'm listening to now" feature.

Customer Reviews

Interesting update to Office 2004
I hope this review serves to clarify some of the complaints that people have posted regarding Office 2008.

Preface:
After being disappointed with Leopard 10.5 -which I also reviewed- I kept using Tiger. When finally 10.5.2 arrived I began using it. It fixes many Leopard bugs. According to some websites, at least 130 bugs have been fixed. This is important since many problems with third party software may be related to other software or to the operating system. For example, Apple is aware of problems with its Sync services and Core Image. Also, some bugs have existed for many years and have not been fixed, such as a potential bug when moving data to an external device.
Keeping these issues in mind I did a completely clean install of Leopard 10.5.2 in a brand new hard drive.
I installed Office 2008 as well as the available upgrade to 12.0.1.

First Impressions:
Some useful features have been added, such as Elements Gallery, which may be a time saver for many people. Some features have been removed, such as VBA, and this may be a deal-breaker for many people.
I'm keeping Office 2004 in a separate partition in order to use previous versions of Word and Excel.
At the same time, I can still use the new versions when I don't need the VBA features.
Lack of VBA support was announced well over a year ago, so this came as no surprise.

Starting up:
Each program took approximately 10 seconds to launch. Office seems to have a peculiar way of handling fonts, though, and launch times can be greatly effected. After installing another program that installed more fonts, and installing Extensis Fusion to manage my fonts, launch times for Office programs was approximately 150 (one hundred and fifty) seconds, instead of the original 10 (ten) seconds.
Now it takes about a minute to launch these programs. In all fairness, the slow down is partly caused by third party software.

Overall (and very brief) impressions:
PowerPoint works with presentations that used to crash my 2004 version. The 2004 version was practically unusable for me. This was a welcome upgrade.

Excel works fine and the Elements Gallery is a good addition. It lost VBA support and the Abalysys Toolpack. I kept the 2004 version as well.

Word seems to be a solid upgrade. Some third party templates do not work with 2008, so I kept Word 2004.

Entourage works very well. I had to re-select the folders that I had set up for my rules, and re-apply categories to my folders. Syncing with Address Book always adds many duplicate contacts. Fortunately there are scripts to deal with this inconvenience. Hyperlinks still require a workaround, as mentioned by another reviewer. I would not rate Office with 1-star solely based on that issue.

Expression Media used to be called iView MediaPro, iView Multimedia, and iView many years ago. It used to be a $25 shareware program when I first used it. Eventually it became quite expensive so I never upgraded until I received this version. So far I'm happy with it. It has worked fine for cataloging thousands of fonts and pictures, and I'm entitled to a free upgrade when version 2 comes out.

Price:
There are free Office alternatives, as well as iWork. I( still prefer Microsoft Office for the most part. The only exception may be Keynote 4.
Microsoft offered a substantial discount under the names of The Technology Guarantee Program and the Super Suite Deal. Additionally, for one day they offered a $[...] rebate. So users could get the Mac Special Media Edition for approximately $[...]-$[...] with these offers.
Had it not been for the offer, I would have stayed with Office 2004. I've used Office 2008 for a few days, every day, and so far have encountered no problems.

Overall I'm satisfied with the upgrade. Support has been great, both by Microsoft and the MVP people. Search their forums and you'll find a lot of useful advise.

Highly Recommended!
I can't believe I'm going to say this, but, Microsoft Office 2008 for the mac, is a must buy if your even remotely interested in office suites.

I run a few different online businesses, as well as doing some consulting, freelance work, and other such practices. Microsoft office deeply changes how I function, and operate in the world. Talk about improved efficiency.
I'm honestly considering no longer buying the yearly iwork suites.

Some new features in MS Word:
Publishing Layout View (this lets you create brochures, flyers, etc, etc) Very easy. This is similar to using Apples Pages. You can get to this view by clicking file -> project gallery and choose one of those kinds of views like Flyers, or Newsletters.

Word's new "Publishing Layout" view lets you create documents off templates similar to those from pages. You can add new pictures just by dragging and dropping your data into the various placeholders found in the template.
Publication Templates - appears at the top of publishing layout view, and lets you change the document into a different type of template (such as a different newsletter) (you can also customize any template when you create a theme using your own pictures, and elements (so much easier than in pages!).

Document Elements - this lets you easily create table of contents, cover pages, Header, Footer, and Bibliographies, you can access these features when you are in Print Layout view.

Excel offers up some new features:
Ledger Sheet (brand new!) - these are preformatted sheets, that let you do things like balance checkbooks, create expense reports, and many other things. This is really cool, and almost pays for itself for buying 2008.

In the project gallery (my favorite office feature) when you have excel open, click Ledger Sheets (off on the left) and you can click Accounts, Budgets, Invoices, Lists, Portfolios, Reports.

If you click one of the ledgers with the green excel bar at the top, it is one of the new ledger features, and as such, already has data, formulas, etc.

Formula Builder - you can now create formulas step by step. You can search for what your trying to do, and you can also scroll through and see all the functions. This is great for when you know, but your not sure which function exactly.

When you double click the function, you then "build it" at the bottom, this is very easy.

Auto Complete Formula - This is similar to when your using dreamweaver in the code view, and start typing in html. In excel when you type = then a letter like S and it will auto complete to sum or show you other options that you can choose. This is very cool and helps to make sure you get the right syntax and the right command each time.

Powerpoint 2008 also has some great new features I will talk about here:
Powerpoint now has Themes which give your slide presentations a unified theme, so everything looks the same (fonts, colors, special effects), and even better, these "themes" translate into other office products (such as word)

You can also now create your own custom layouts inside of powerpoint, which lets you choose where you want your images, text, charts, etc.

Powerpoint now lets you share your presentations to iphoto (which you can then sync on your ipod/iphone) Basically it turns your presentations into images. This is great if you want to share you presentation with someone who does not have powerpoint, or if you prefer to not lug your laptop around, and prefer to just your ipod/iphone as your presentation device.

Entourage New Features:
You can now create to do lists (and flagging). When your in entourage, click To Do List (which is next to your calendar) and you can add stuff that you need to do, you can also set due dates.

From an email, you can choose if / when you want to follow up with the email and flag it by clicking (tomorrow, next week, or choose one on a certain date), you can also choose a reminder. (to remind you at a certain time)

If your not going to be at the office for a while, you can setup an automatic rule, that can automatically reply to your incoming emails, telling them that you are away, and you will be back ___ and you can contact someone else, or if its important, call me at this number ___
To set it up go to Tools -> then click on Rules. Give it a name, and set up the function.

When you get back, all you need to do is go to Tools -> rules -> and uncheck whatever you named the rule to stop it for now (you can always reenable by clicking that box)

My favorite new feature quite easily is Entourages My Day.app.

My Day lets you manage your to do lists, and your calendar (and you no do not have to have entourage running) it shows what you need to do, the timeline, it is so cool, and is another one of those lovely features that make this a no-brainer purchase. If you have an appointment later on in the day (say you have a meeting at 8), it will show at the top that you are "free until 8) which is such a nice feature. You can skip around to other days and see what you need to do, (or what you previously did). You can add new tasks (to do) from within the my day.app so you do not have to open up entourage to add a quick task.

Another great feature is the Calendar, which is now very useful, looks much better, and is more functional.

The main difference between Special media and the regular edition of 2008 is Expression Media 2 (which you will need to download from Microsoft's website) This is a very nice, high end organizational software to manage you digital files (including raw images) Search is very fast, and tagging is quick and easy. One of the benefits for me with using this software is the ability to create different contact sheets, and online photogalleries. If you do not currently have a program capable of managing your digital assets, you cannot go wrong with Expression media. It is very robust, and powerful. It does not (for me) replace my current workflow (Adobe Lightroom) but for the price, it is very much so worth it. I highly recommend it if your into digital photography, or even just image creation. I'm using it now to organize files that I create (opposed to digital photography), and it works very well. It increases productivity, is beautiful, and helps me keep track of everything very quickly.


In conclusion, my productivity has greatly increase since getting Microsoft Office. Entourage alone eliminates so much hassle, that in an of itself is worth getting. No longer do I need Mail.app addressbook, ical, stickies, all open at the same time. I can open up entourage, set my schedule, close it, and have my day.app open telling me what to do and when keeping me on track and on schedule.

The new features in word / excel / and powerpoint do give serious fight to the iwork suite. I look forward to the next office release, and the next iwork release (to see how apple fights some of these cool and exiting features)

Easily a 5 out of 5. The only downside to 2008 is you loose macros, and you loose VBA scripting. (but you can use applescript and automator, and VBA is supposed to be back soon, which will give us macros back).

good and better, but still not best
I've used the Windows version of office since 97 to 2003 to 2007.
I've also used the Mac version of office from 2004 and now 2008.
The 2008 is better than 2004 no doubt.
But having used Pages and Keynote of iWork, I still appreciate the clean design and overall layout of Pages much better than that of the Office Word.
I don't want to do a full blown comparison, but just to share personal use experiences.
The 2008 is fancy. It has a lot of interactive menus for different functions and when in different needs. But I still don't think the user need to be so deeply involved in everything it can do. It is just fancy.
I like the Notebook feature of the Word, however, it does a much better job than MacJournal which I bought. So I am only using Word in the Notebook mode when I am in lecture or in need of taking a meeting note. (of which I can turn on the Audio recording mode). The recording is done nicely, but I think it should have a choice of different indexing (by time interval or by note taking; text input). (For example, there may be 30 min of lecture I didn't want to take notes but I want to be able to access different sections of the 30 minutes at 5 min indexing.
As for the Media Expression feature, I haven't used it because I am afraid that it will create a double database of my iPhoto library which is exceeding 120GB already (including the MP4 movies).
I was using the Home and Student edition before I got the Full blown version (with the Exchange support--which I don't need.)
I don't feel any difference from the base student version. Not only that, the Student version comes with 3 different product ID for different computers you and your children may have (in school, in a different room, etc.) This full version comes with only 1 product number.
The 2004 version was very stable. The 2008 version creates some kind of trash everytime after you use it.
When I use Word to take notes daily, if you turn off and on again, there is always something in the trash that was created by Word. I don't know why.
Overall, I give it 4 stars because of its features.
But the look is still very busy and fancy.
It also crashes when I copy and paste a huge web page into a Word document.
That's why I still use Pages to save webpages (copy and paste) or newsletter publishing. It is just much more stable and easy to do.
I'd recommend the Student version if you don't need the Exchange support.
I used the Excel a few times and it is stable and fast.
Powerpoint is also like the 2004, nothing much is new. I still prefer Keynote because it just looks much more professional and easy to add animation and slide transitions.
The $149 student version is a good deal if you don't like iWork. I spent $79 and got the iWork.
I find myself using both of them about 60% Office and about 40% iWorks.
Oh, almost forgot, very important.
After installing this, your Quicktime will not be able to play WMV file (only audio with black screen), even if you have Flip4Mac installed.
You need to reinstall the Flip4Mac to get it to work again.