It has been 24 years since Microsoft first released Word, and four years since the program’s last major upgrade. How much more can Microsoft do to tweak its venerable word processor? Surprisingly, Word gets several major enhancements in Office 2008, the first version of Microsoft’s productivity suite to run natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs. Those changes include a new document format, a simplified toolbar, and a new toolbox that combines palettes for managing formatting, clip art, iPhoto images, research, and bibliographies. But the biggest improvement is the addition of a new view option called Publishing Layout. In this new view, arranging text and graphics on the page is far simpler than it was in previous versions of Word. Like Apple, Microsoft has apparently concluded that people use word processing programs for far more than just creating text-based documents.
Feb 24, 2012 - Open your header by double-clicking the top of your Word document. (You'll know it's the. As page numbers, in Microsoft Word for Mac 2008. Office 2008 combines Microsoft Word for Mac, Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac, Microsoft Excel for Mac, Microsoft Entourage for Mac, and Microsoft Messenger for.
Creating complex, graphics-rich documents requires tools historically found in powerful page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. Like, Microsoft Word now allows you to select a distinct editing environment specifically for creating layout-intensive documents. That environment is Publishing Layout. The biggest downside in what would otherwise be an excellent upgrade: the elimination of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
In its place, Word 2008 offers limited support for AppleScript and Automator. Those replacements don’t offer the recording or other features that made it pretty simple to automate and customize Word 2004. If you’re accustomed to Word 2004’s automation features, you’re going to be disappointed in Word 2008.
Preferences Pane: Word’s new preferences pane is more Mac-like and better organizes Word’s many preference options, making it much easier to customize the program. Fresh look Like the other Office 2008 apps, Word has a new user interface that makes it easier to manage preferences, consolidates most of Word’s formatting tools, and puts key document elements—including cover pages, headers, footers, and bibliographies—a single click away. The first and most obvious interface change is the new toolbar. It sits at the top of your document window, rather than being tied to the menu bar. In previous versions, Word’s toolbars could fill up most of the top of your screen. They were too easy to accidentally rearrange and contained way more buttons than most people used. Word 2008’s simpler toolbar includes all of what you need to effectively open, create, and save documents, undo and redo changes, and add tables and columns.
If there’s a button you don’t want or one that you think is missing, it’s easy to change the toolbar. Unfortunately, Word still doesn’t use the typical Mac toolbar customization sheet; Microsoft says those sheets couldn’t manage all the options Microsoft wanted to offer. Just below Word’s toolbar is the Elements Gallery, a set of five new buttons from which you can quickly add document elements, tables, charts, SmartArt graphics, and WordArt to documents. The Document Elements button, for example, lets you quickly add or modify cover pages, headers and footers, or a table of contents. Some users may find it annoying that they can’t remove this Gallery; I think more will be grateful for its presence. Elements Gallery: You can’t get rid of the toolbar that now appears at the top of every document, but it does give you quick access to all kinds of graphics and other document options. Word 2008’s new Toolbox combines a bunch of different palettes in one floating tool.
From it, you can quickly access formatting options, insertable symbols, clip art, your iPhoto library, reference tools, and Office’s Scrapbook and Project Center. In previous versions, those tools were scattered among menus, toolbars, and floating palettes; they’re now all in one place. Aside from the formatting tools, I particularly liked the Toolbox’s Citations panel, which allows you to quickly and simply create a database of reference works. By adding articles, Web sites, books, and other materials to this database, you can easily add them to your document.
Word will then automatically create a bibliography or citation page (in APA, Chicago, MLA, or Turabian format). Previous editions of Word had limited versions of this feature, but it was not this obvious or easy to use. Still, the Toolbox lacks the simplicity of Pages’ floating palettes. For example, depending on what was selected in my document and which disclosure triangles were opened, the Formatting palette sometimes outgrew my screen—even when I was working on a 20-inch iMac. Closing those disclosure triangles took care of this problem, but it would be nice if Word worked more like Pages, which uses a tabbed format for document options and which allows you to open more than one floating palette at a time. I was also frustrated by the fact that my scroll wheel didn’t work on scrollbars in the formatting palette but did work on other scrollbars in the Toolbox. One other nice interface change: Word 2008’s new Preferences panel is much better organized and more Mac-like than Word 2004’s.
Publishing tools Publishing Layout: Word’s new Publishing Layout view gives you greater control over how text and images appear in your documents. It’s always been a bit frustrating using Word to create brochures, postcards, posters, or other types of documents that require arranging different elements on the page. Previous versions simply haven’t been designed to perform that kind of page layout magic.
Word 2008’s new Publishing Layout view changes that dramatically. Publishing Layout offers a bunch of tools for placing and manipulating text and graphics on the page. Like Pages, Word 2008 allows you to create template documents with image and text placeholders; you can drag and drop images and text into those placeholders, making it easy to turn those templates into new, fresh documents. You can also link text boxes so text overflows from one to another. The image-editing tools in Publishing Layout aren’t as good as those in Pages. While it is possible to add masks and transparency and make minor adjustments to images in your document, the program is nowhere near as adept at it as Pages.
Another thing I noticed: the longer I worked in Publishing Layout mode, the slower Word seemed to get when manipulating images or moving text boxes around on the page. Bye-bye, VBA Word 2008 adopts the new, XML-based.docx format for documents. That format makes Word 2008 compatible with the latest version of Word for Windows. Unfortunately, those documents can’t be opened in older versions of Word without the downloadable.docx converter from Microsoft. To bypass this problem, Word 2008 does allow you to save documents in the older.doc format using a Compatibility Mode. More significantly, Office 2008 marks the demise of Visual Basic for Applications.
In its stead, Word includes an AppleScript library. Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, Word’s AppleScript library isn’t nearly as complete as the VBA library was. In addition, while there are 30 Automator actions for Word, they aren’t that useful. Neither AppleScript nor Automator will let you record a string of events in Word and save them as a reusable script. Word does a good job of merging data from a variety of sources, including text files, Office’s own address book, and FileMaker Pro. But, unlike Pages, Word can’t merge data from Apple’s Address Book app. I’d prefer a program that can merge data from any source.
But, given the choice, I’d take Word’s missing Address Book merge to Pages’ missing everything else. Should I stay? The question for most Mac users isn’t “Should I buy Word 2008?” It’s “Should I upgrade?” As a word processor, Word 2008 is no better or worse than Word 2004. You’ll be able to create and format documents the way you want to, print them, and get them out the door. But the new user interface is cleaner; thanks to some great design decisions at Microsoft, there’s virtually no learning curve. Yes, it’s a pain that you can’t hide the Elements Gallery, but it never got in my way and it definitely put some previously hard-to-find features at my fingertips. Word’s enhanced publishing tools are a huge plus; Windows users have had Publisher for eons and the addition of Publishing Layout levels the playing field for Mac users.
That said, you can get better page layout tools for less money (without losing Office file compatibility) from iWork’s Pages. The loss of VBA is a travesty; if you’re using Word in a mixed business environment with both Macs and Windows machines and you rely on a lot of macros, it’s a deal breaker. The Automator scripts that come with Word 2008 are not particularly valuable as automation tools, and there’s no easy way to automate with AppleScript. If you need automation, Word 2008 is not for you. Macworld’s buying advice As a word processor, little has changed in Word 2008. The elimination of VBA and weak support for AppleScript and Automator make the program far less versatile and valuable for users who really need automation.
But the program’s streamlined interface and the addition of the new Publishing Layout view make it a compelling choice, especially if you want to stretch Word beyond its current capabilities. Jeffery Battersby is a network manager who lives in upstate New York.
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12.3.6 / March 12, 2013; 5 years ago ( 2013-03-12).9 or later Website System requirements or (500 MHz or faster) or any processor or later 512 MB Free space 1.5 GB Optical drive (for local installation) Notes Unofficially runs on Macs (like the in Bondi Blue) and with less RAM. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the for. It supersedes (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of.
Office 2008 was developed by Microsoft's and released on January 15, 2008. Office 2008 was followed by released on October 26, 2010, requiring a Mac with an Intel processor and or better. Office 2008 is also the last version to feature Entourage, which was replaced by Outlook in Office 2011. Microsoft stopped supporting Office 2008 on April 9, 2013.
Contents. Release Office 2008 was originally slated for release in the second half of 2007; however, it was delayed until January 2008, purportedly to allow time to fix lingering bugs.
Office 2008 is the only version of Office for Mac supplied as a. Unlike Office 2007 for Windows, Office 2008 was not offered as a public before its scheduled release date.
Features Office 2008 for Mac includes the same core programs currently included with Office 2004 for Mac:,. Mac-only features included are a publishing layout view, which offers functionality similar to for Windows, a 'Ledger Sheet mode' in Excel to ease financial tasks, and a 'My Day' application offering a quick way to view the day's events. Office 2008 supports the new format, and defaults to saving all files in this format. On February 21, 2008 Geoff Price revealed that the format conversion update for Office 2004 would be delayed until June 2008 in order to provide the first update to Office 2008.
Microsoft is not supported in this version. As a result, such Excel add-ins dependent on VBA, such as Solver, have not been bundled in the current release.
In June 2008, Microsoft announced that it is exploring the idea of bringing some of the functionality of Solver back to Excel. In late August 2008, Microsoft announced that a new Solver for Excel 2008 was available as a free download from Frontline Systems, original developers of the Excel Solver.
However, Excel 2008 also lacks other functionality, such as Pivot Chart functionality, which has long been a feature in the Windows version. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that VBA will be making a return in the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac. And the will still be supported. Limitations.
Error message in Microsoft Excel showing features that are not supported Office 2008 for Mac lacks feature parity with the Windows version. The lack of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support in Excel makes it impossible to use macros programmed in VBA. Microsoft's response is that adding VBA support in Xcode would have resulted in an additional two years added to the development cycle of Office 2008. Other unsupported features include: equations generated in Word 2007 for Windows, Office ', and an extensive list of features are unsupported such as equivalent integration with the Windows version.
Some features are missing on Excel 2008 for Mac, including: data filters (Data Bars, Top 10, Color-based, Icon-based), structured references, Excel tables, Table styles, a sort feature allowing more than three columns at once and more than one filter on a sort. Benchmarks suggest that the original release of Office 2008 runs slower on Macs with PowerPC processors, and does not provide a significant speed bump for Macs with Intel processors. A data-compatibility problem has also been noted with 's chemical structure drawing program,. Word 2008 does not retain the structural information when a chemical structure is copied from ChemDraw and pasted into a document. If a structure is recopied from a Word 2008 document, and is pasted back into ChemDraw, it appears as a non-editable image rather than a recognized chemical structure. There is no such problem in Word 2004 or X. This issue has not been fixed in the SP2 (version 12.2.0, released in July 2009).
On May 13, 2008, Microsoft released Office 2008 Service Pack 1 as a free update. However, there have been many reports of the updater failing to install, resulting in a message saying that an updatable version of Office 2008 was not found.
This appears to be related to users modifying the contents of the Microsoft Office folder in ways which do not cause problems with most other software (such as 'localizing' using a program to remove application support files in unwanted languages), and which do not affect Office's operations, but which cause the updaters' installers to believe that the application is not valid for update. A small modification to the installer has been found an effective work-around (see reference). Another widespread problem reported after SP1 is that Office files will no longer open in Office applications when opened (double-clicked) from the Mac OS X Finder or launched from other applications such as an email attachment. The trigger for this problem is that Microsoft in SP1 unilaterally and without warning deprecated certain older Mac OS 'Type' codes such as 'WDBN' that some files may have, either because they are simply very old, or because some applications assign the older Type code when saving them to the disk. Users have seen the problem affect even relatively new Type codes, however, such as 'W6BN'.
Microsoft is apparently looking into the problem, but it is unclear if they will reinstate the older Type codes, citing security concerns. Another problem with cross-platform compatibility is that images inserted into any Office application by using either cut and paste or drag and drop result in a file that does not display the inserted graphic when viewed on a Windows machine. Instead, the Windows user is told 'QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture'. A user presented one solution as far back as December 2004.
A further example of the lack of feature parity is the track changes function. Whereas users of Word 2003 or 2007 for Windows are able to choose freely between showing their changes in-line or as balloons in the right-hand margin, choosing the former option in Word 2004 or Word 2008 for Mac OS also turns off all comment balloons; comments in this case are visible only in the Reviewing Pane or as popup boxes (i.e. Upon mouseover). This issue has not been resolved to date and is present in the latest version of Word for the Mac, namely Word 2011.
The toolbox found in Office 2008 also has problems when the OS X feature is used: switching from one Space to another will cause elements of the Toolbox to get trapped on one Space until the Toolbox is closed and reopened. The only remedy for this problem is to currently disable Spaces, or at least refrain from using it whilst working in Office 2008. Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and states that it is an architectural problem with the implementation of Spaces. Apple has been informed of the problem, according to Microsoft.
The problem appears to be caused by the fact that the Toolbox is -based. Using Microsoft Office with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard solves some of the problems. In addition, there is no support for and languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2008, making it impossible to read or edit a document in Word 2008 or PowerPoint 2008. Languages such as are similarly not supported, although installing fonts can sometimes allow documents written in these languages to be displayed.
Moreover, Office 2008 proofing tools support only a limited number of languages (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Swiss German). Proofing tools for other languages failed to find their way to the installation pack, and are not offered by Microsoft commercially in the form of separately sold language packs. At the same time, Office applications are not integrated with the proofing tools native to Mac OS X 10.6 Leopard. Is not available for OS X. This means that any embedded Visio diagrams in other Office documents (e.g. Word) cannot be edited in Office on the Mac. Embedded Visio diagrams appear as a low-quality bitmap both in the WYSIWYG editor and upon printing the document on the Mac.
Editions Comparison of different editions of Office 2008 for Mac Applications and services Home & Student Standard Business Edition Special Media Edition Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Exchange Server support No Yes Yes Yes Automator Actions No Yes Yes Yes Office Live and SharePoint support No No Yes No No No No Yes See also. References. Retrieved February 10, 2018. January 15, 2008. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
January 9, 2007. Archived from on October 11, 2007. August 2, 2007. April 2, 2007. Archived from on September 28, 2007.
Retrieved September 19, 2007. January 15, 2008. August 8, 2006. January 15, 2008.
June 26, 2008. August 29, 2008. August 29, 2008. May 13, 2008. March 13, 2008. March 13, 2008. January 26, 2009, at the.
Archived from on June 26, 2008. Retrieved June 30, 2008. CS1 maint: Archived copy as title. Archived from on July 2, 2009.
Retrieved July 9, 2009. CS1 maint: Archived copy as title. Archived from on February 27, 2009.
Retrieved May 30, 2010., Macworld, December 8, 2008. ^, Microsoft. External links.