For this review, I will be using a MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM and a 12” PowerBook with a 1.5GHz G4 and 1.25GB RAM. Both computers have the latest Leopard Build on them (559).

Installation:
On both of the computers, the Installation went very smooth. The Steps for the Installation are as follows: Introduction, License, Product Key, Destination, Installation Type, Installation, Remove Office (older versions), and finally Summary. After the simple 5 minute Installation, an “Identity Creator” opened itself and asked me for my Name, Company, Phone Number, and email address. At first I closed the application, but then realized that I had to register myself in order to use the Office ’08 Applications. After the “Identity” was created, the Office Applications put themselves in my dock without asking me, and Office Gallery Launcher opened itself. I could already tell this was a Microsoft Product.

Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac:


As I am writing this review in Word, everything is different, but it all seems so similar. Maybe it is because I have used Office since Mac OS 9 and just recently switched to iWork. It could also be because Word has gained almost every single feature that Pages had.
Performance
On my aging PowerBook, I was happy to find that all the effects were happily bouncing along on their path until they got to where they were supposed to be with no jerkiness at all. One thing that is annoying is that the keys seem to be lagging behind the words that I am typing on the keyboard. It almost seems to be worse than on the 2004 version of Office. Also, saving can take up to 4 seconds, rendering the application useless until it is done.



The Gallery
The Gallery is almost the exact same as it is in Pages. Under Document Elements you can choose from Cover Pages, Table of Contents, Header, Footer, and Bibliographies. From Quick Tables you can choose from Basic and Complex, each having a range of Tables you can choose from. In Charts, you can choose from All, Area, Bar, Bubble, Column, Doughnut, Line, Pie, Radar, Stock, Surface, and X-Y Scatter. In SmartArt Graphics, you can choose from Recent, List, Process, Cycle, Hierarchy, Relationship, Matrix, and Pyramid. Finally, from WordArt, you can choose between Simple, Elegant, Bold, Enhanced, and Elegant.

Other Features
Other than the ones mentioned, there really aren’t that many new features to be told of. If you have used Microsoft Word before, you will get the feeling of refreshment, and comfort, because it feels very familiar.


Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac:


While I am not an avid Spreadsheet user, I will try my best to cover all the new features that are in Excel. Excel is almost the exact same as where Microsoft left it in 2004, with the addition of the Gallery, which is almost the same as it is in Word. Excel needs some work, from what I can tell. The Ribbon UI uses the exact same icon for the Galleries that involve selecting a certain elements in the Gallery. Regarding performance, Excel’s Gallery was slow and choppy, while Word’s was nice an flowing. While I don’t have much more to say, I can say this: I much prefer Numbers over Excel.



Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac:


Microsoft had some competition when Apple released Keynote 4.0. They have gained some ground back with PowerPoint 2008. PowerPoint now is more user Friendly, and is taking advantage of the Gallery in all Office 2008 Applications.
The Gallery
PowerPoint has gained a lot of functionality with the Gallery. Now all the effects and themes from one area. You can choose from Slide Themes, Slide Layout, Transitions, Table Styles, Charts, SmartArt Graphics, and WordArt. I think that this is much better than the old 2004 PowerPoint Method of doing things. When choosing a transition, you can select the transition, and it does this short preview that is already over before it started and it had told me nothing about the transition. You have to do it several times before actually knowing what the transition did. Good Job Microsoft, you have implemented another new feature in a wrong way!
PowerPoint is good, and I think that Apple will need to push the limits with the next version of Keynote.

Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac:
Entourage is Microsoft’s answer to Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Can it finally take them down? The answer is no. It does take a long time to open, it makes strange noises at random times(like when you turned off email notification and it is idle). With this Application, I think that Microsoft tried to pack too much into one Application. The UI itself is not very space efficient and it is slow to use. On top of it all, Microsoft had to put a little window that showed all the attachments before showing the actual message. I would try to avoid this.



Stability:
I would say that the stability is surprisingly good for a beta Microsoft Product. Word only crashed once, causing me to rewrite the Entourage part of the review. As I said before, Microsoft needs to increase the speed a little, especially with typing. Also, I have had many graphical errors happen. Many times text disappears until you select the area where the text is and it promptly shows up. I would say you could use this product full time if you saved a lot and your standards weren’t very high.
4 out of 5 without the obvious Beta Glitches

How did you feel about Entourage launching the Microsoft AU Daemon in the background and phoning home on port 80 to a special beta server?

Anyone wanna try and catch what it sends? You can't just restart Entourage, because the AU Daemon stays running. You need to kill it in Activity Viewer and then launch Entourage to get it to phone home again. Little Snitch comes it real handy here.

I tried to catch what it said, and all I could find was that process talking to my mail server(mail.comcast.net). Thats all I could see running.
Microsoft Entourage=
YOU
PHAIL
LIFE

While in the Installation Type step, hit customize and uncheck the dock icons box. MS does let you choose not to put the icons in the dock, it's just very obvious.

AU = Automatic Update

Great review

I love it. Sooo much nicer and easier to use that 04...

Nice review. I have always liked MS office on the PC and Mac, and am glad that the Mac version is finaly up to par with the Windows one.

I can't see the toolbar ;(




And...... excel not working for me "Not enough memory" :S

Back to 2004

Sure, the new interface is gorgeus.. A real eye candy, but who needs that for real work? Especially when that doesn't enhance productivity at all. Am I the only one having a hard time trying to figure out where all the old, so familiar functions, have gone in both Mac Office 2008 (Beta) and Office 2007 for the PC?
I thought they'd been rearranged to be easier to find for newbies, but I had to reconsider this thought since my mother doubled her yelling for "Where is function X, son??" lately...
Well, maybe it's just the way we learned using typewriting software, maybe the youngsters will really find this software well structured.

My major concern about this (Beta) version of Office 2008 for the Mac is actually the lack of a new version of Messenger for Mac! I specifically decided to give this Beta a try because I was hoping for something at least similar to Windows Live Messenger for the PC, and all I get is the old crappy 6.0.3 version! I'm slowly convincing friends and relatives to "Get a Mac", but I still have dozens of friends who, using Windows Live Messenger, spend their time complaining with me about my poor transfer speeds, my missing support for animoticons or handwriting, video and audio... That's kind of frustrating, you know... Wasn't a new version supposed to be in the works and scheduled for release with Office 2008? Where's that in this Office Beta?
But maybe I just dreamt about this.

We should all remember, finally, that since MS software is always in what I call a "slightly more than Beta" stage, their Beta software should be therefore considered as "slightly more than Alpha". Stability and performance issues are just normal and will be ironed out in a later development stage... Eventually... Maybe...

Then again it doesn't hurt it either. It looks like they put a lot of time trying to make this version look good. Anyone notice that a lot of the buttons not only highlight, but have a ripple effect when you mouse over? I just hope that they didn't waste time they could have used for making it more stable/faster.

The new locations of some functions did take a little getting used to, but it sped my workflow up considerably. The same can be said about Office '07. Still trying to figure out which one I like more...

curious on everybody's opinions - do you think this is safe to use without little snitch? i ran word and excel '08 quickly with my network connection unplugged but decided to stick with office '04 until i heard thoughts on this matter. thanks.

I don't know why only Entourage enables the AU daemon, but here is the attempt.

If it really is just an update check, then it's probably fine, but I don't know, and letting MS know what my IP is for a version of Office I'm not supposed to have yet makes me a bit uneasy.

What are they gonna do, sue me?.........oh, wait....

People used beta copies of Vista that they weren't supposed to have and I didn't read any new articles of people getting in trouble for it. If they weren't worried about a whole OS, they certainly shouldn't worry about a copy of Office...

does it support docx already?

Thanks Numberz
Very good review and helpful for me.

it does !

I like iWork '08...

MSOffice only remains for opening those stubborn documents that don't import properly. I see Microsoft have really ripped off the Pages interface for Word '08 too.

As much as I loathe M$, their Office products have always been hard to beat. I can't live w/out "Outlook" at work, and at home, "Entourage" is no different. I'm really glad to see this reviewed, and it already answered some of my concerns. I hope they keep developing this though, it "looks" rough, and the issues that are there now are very relevant, specially the slowness. Although I don't have much hope for that being fixed, do u know of any M$ software that they "sped" up? <insert bad M$ Millennium joke>

As far as avoiding Entourage, why again? Here's my biggest gripe w/ "Mail" and why I switched to "Entourage" at home. . . .Mail doesn't notify you if you receive an email that goes into a smart mail box, Entourage does. Unless I'm seriously missing an option in Mail's preferences, if I have some people's addresses filtered in my mailbox, Mail won't display the little new mail message icon, or ring the sound, Entourage does. And since I use Outlook religiously at work, using Entourage became a natural migration, despite its great UI ugliness.

As far as using it to replace Address Book, iCal, and Mail, I think it never will, but for an "all in one" suite, it does a great job. So why avoid it again? Not that I'm arguing, just extremely interested what's changed so much from 2004 to '08 to warrant such a statement?

Well, I'll be adding the other cent soon enough, but from what I see it looks like its gonna be, well, Microsoft Office *GASP*.
Not sure if its gonna wow me, but I'll certainly find my inner spreadsheet-er.

Booo, I am not cool enough to get to play with the Beta!

I have to say, that I am not impressed at all. Having recently been a Mac convert, I left Office 2007 and went to Office 2004. Not a very pleasant change. So unpleasant in fact that I now use Parallels and run Office 2007. If you have not used to, it really is a truly phenomenal update to the organization and grouping of tools. Office 2004 has this weird bank of settings which I don't like. It seems to me that Office 2008 is really an improvement of 2004, while I was hoping for a port of 2007. It looks to me that I will probably stick with 2007, I really don't like that extra tool bar thing floating around.

I'm also a recent convert, I've dumped office first for Openoffice from openoffice.org an X11 package,THEN found NeoOffice, it is based on OpenOffice but it is written for Aqua so no X11 interference! WOW i've not missed MS Office for one day YET!BO Yes, i forgot NeoOffice looks just like all the preview pics you see here AND it has not come up with an ERROR yet or "wanted to phone home"Do Yourself the fovour and download and install it, Did i mention that its OPENSOURCE, FREE?!B

I have to say that after trying this beta of office 2008 I'm very impressed so far. I've only used word at the moment but I must point out that the one time I tried excel the app crashed.
Word's new features are great and the ui is so much more friendly and impressive than its predecessor.

I've really been trying lately to cut back on 'acquired' software, but office is a tough cookie for Mac. For the most part I use NeoOffice, but I don't love it. I'm not thrilled about Office 2004 either. It looks like I may move toward iWork if I decide to buy it. It seems to be pretty complete these days.

I find it confusing that Microsoft would take the effort to develop a mac version of office and not make it significantly enough better to ward off the up and coming iWork. With price advantage and everything else, I'm sure it will be a matter of time before Microsoft finally gives up on the platform. Albeit better than a half decade, I think their share will quickly dwindle. iWork bringing the first Office 2007 compatibility to the Mac platform is not a good sign. How ironic after the years that Microsoft helped buoy there sales, now they will soon be independent.

It is very sad that Entourage 2008 does not support HTML signatures with tables and images. What a shame!

Can someone, who has access to the Entourage 08 beta, comment on whether it can import data (emails, to-do's, addresses etc) from Windows Outlook?

I didn't even realize this had leaked. Could you post the Splash screens and About dialogs please Numberz, thank you. Awesome review by the way.

Mac-Mini, you're s Mac Pro, awesome thanks!

Hey, I have been playing with this beta and in Word, there are several "Publication Templates", similar to what you find in Pages.

But some of the screenshots show templates for newsletters, postcards, invitations, resumes, etc., and my copy only shows templates for brochures, flyers, programs, menus and posters. Is there some way to add these other templates, or is that just because this beta is still an unfinished product and these other templates are to be added later?

Doesn't seem so directly, but I have no experience with Windows Outlook, so I don't know what it can export to - so I just gave you a few screenies of the import menu. Ask if you need anything else.

Office 2008 plus a Leopard release for OSx86 will be my say-la-vie to Windows as my fulltime OS.

OFFICE 2004 sucks...

Could some post some screenshots of the actual setup itself, such as the main setup screen, wizard pages. My understanding drag and drop is not supported anymore.

Thanks

I can confirm that drag and drop is supported, in Word at least, and here is a screen from the setup:-



As the sizes are missing, Office took up just under 900MB of space for me, without all of the extra languages, such as Brazilian.

Thanks for the screenshot Tomozj. Thats a large installation though, I guess its because the files are Universal fat binaries or there is still some debug code in the beta. Its looking good so far though. Office 2007 Enterprise which I have installed uses somewhere around 622 MBs but thats understandable since it comes with 9 applications.

Don't know if anyone else noticed, but there's a button on the top right of the toolbox. When you click it, it flips over like a widget and lets you customize all of the menus. Very cool.

Someone might have mentioned this, but now the toolbars go into the Document window. So now they are not new windows.

Does that mean then that you can have the formula bar in Excel in the actual window and not as a retarded floating tool bar (because that does make sense with this new window design they have) ?

Its all looking pretty cool! Can't wait for January Oh well Leopard and the iPhone will have to occupy me until then.

Could someone post the About Dialogs for Word, Excel, PPT and Entourage.

Microsoft has always dominated this area. I don't think that's going to change any time soon. Office seems very slow on OS X though. On my system with Vista, a word document opens within 3 seconds. The same operation in OS X takes between 18-20 seconds.

15 secs here on tiger...yes under xp it takes less but...who cares, I like OSX.
I hope with the next beta will be better.