The delayed Office 2008 for Mac has just launched a preview site to show off its showpiece features. You can get a good look at the Elements Gallery (the Mac update to ‘the Ribbon’), Document Elements, Publishing Layout View, OfficeArt, SmartArt Graphics, Chart Building for Excel, and My Day features. The site’s pretty schmick… but I’d rather have some beta software to fool around with.
I sat down with Julia Nicholls from Microsoft earlier in the year to talk about the next Office for Mac, and it was interesting to hear that the Mac BU team likes to get competitive with the Windows Office crew – to deliver something for the stylish Mac crowd that shows up the Windows version. Mac fanboys would be pleased to hear that, I’m sure… though again, they might just prefer the product? Either way, the Mac BU blog is pretty good for some ongoing insight into their efforts, with a current post on the evolution of the UI. [Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 and the Mac Mojo blog]