TMO at Macworld - Microsoft Announces Office 2008 for the Mac

by , 3:45 PM EST, January 9th, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft announced on Tuesday that Office 2008 for the Mac is in development and should be available in the second half of 2007. The new version of the office productivity suite will include Universal Binary versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage - all capable of running natively on Intel and PowerPC-based Macs.

Roz Ho, general manager of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft commented "Office 2008 is, by far, the most comprehensive, Mac-complementary productivity suite we've developed to date."

The suite shares the same "ribbon" interface found on the new version of Office for Windows, along with several Mac-only features including a Publishing Layout view in Word, Ledgers Sheets in Excel, and a My Day view for reviewing your schedule.

The Mac version of Office will switch to Microsoft's Open XML file formats to ensure cross platform file compatibility.

A major concern for many Mac Office users has been file compatibility with the new version of Office for Windows. The Mac BU plans to address those concerns by releasing a public beta of the file converters for Office 2004 this spring. The file converters will allow Office 2004 users to open and save Open XML-formatted documents.

Pricing and upgrade information is not yet available.