Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition
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 List Price: $149.95 Sale Price: $129.99 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Eligible For Free Shipping 
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Product Description
Homework and Home Work will be easier than ever with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition. Get better results faster and create high-quality documents you can be proud of, with less frustration and more enjoyment.
| Five Great Reasons to Get Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition: Universal applications: Office 2008 runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs. Intuitive interface: Reduce the time and frustration of learning new software and creating documents with visual galleries that present the right tools when you need them. Your Mac, more compatible: Office 2008 for Mac and Windows-based 2007 Office products share the Open XML file formats and features like the Office Art graphics engine, so you'll be confident when sharing documents with colleagues, friends, and family across platforms. Beautiful documents: Good design is a click away with hundreds of new templates, Smart Art graphics, Publishing Layout View, and professional quality clip art and photos. Priced for home users: Don't need Microsoft Exchange Server Support or workflow management? Home and student users pay for just the features they need. Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition comes with three licenses of non-Exchange-enabled Office 2008 licensed for noncommercial computers. Which Version of Office 2008 is right for you? View this comparison chart. |
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.
Details
- 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
- Professional design is within your power with hundreds of new customizable templates and suite-wide themes, SmartArt graphics, and the new Publishing Layout View in Word 2008
- My Day keeps you connected to all of the day's action. Command your calendar, tackle your tasks, and simplify your day
- Includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage
Rating
+ A quarter step up over Office 2007 for Windows. Mac users should be happy that we come a year after the Windows release; consequently, giving us a few new features over our Windows friends for 3 years.
Compatibility with Office 2007 and previous versions is excellent.
A nice Surprise is that speed is faster than the 2004 version even though it is full of new bloat I mean features. Being natively compiled for Intel has its advantages.
While I like Apples iWork Suite, Excel is heads and shoulders above Apple’s Numbers application. Pages is a great app just not compatible enough with MS Words formats.
This is a must own app if you need a spreadsheet, or trade Word documents with anyone.
Rating
I installed Office 2008 yesterday on my MacBook, keeping Office 2004 installed in case there were problems. So far all is working well and Word, Excel and Powerpoint files created with Office 2004 open and edit just fine. And I far prefer the user interface.
Reviews prior to mid-March may be overly negative. Update 12.0.1 080305 has been reported to make a big difference in loading speed and stability.
The new file formats of Office 2008 can be a problem for compatibility with other Office users. My first act was to use Preferences to have each program save to Office 2004 file format.
Rating
For me, as a recent switchover from PC to MAC, this is THE application that makes it all worthwhile. Still use a PC on the side and at work, I was extremely pleased that I can seamlessly share Excel, Word and PowerPoint files between the 2 platforms. Entourage, the e-mail/contacts/calendar application, is the MS Outlook equivalent for the MAC, except better. The Home & Student version that I purchased does everything I need it to without fail. By far, one of the best s/w applications that I use daily and has made the switch to MAC a cinch.
Rating
I really wavered between between buying a license to iWork 08 or Office 2008 they’re both so good. Although much easier to use, iWork 08 just didn’t have all the features I needed, plus I get a lot of Word and Excel docs from colleagues on PC’s (you can easily import MS Office docs into iWork 08 but then you have to continually export to return them back).
Office 2008 is very polished and I really like it. Although the price is almost twice the price of iWorks you actually get three licenses in the pack which is a major bonus.
If you are a professional user, need all the MS Office features you had on the PC, need to exchange MS Office documents with other Mac and PC users, or you have at least 3 Macs in your household I would say that Office 2008 is the right choice. Otherwise iWorks is more than adequate for the casual and less demanding user.
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I don’t understand, the people at CNET can say Office for the Mac 2008 doesn’t have all the features that Office for Windows 2007 has. I don’t agree. I use the Windows version at home and have the Mac version on three different computers. One at work now and a desktop (iMac) and a laptop (PowerBook G4) and to me the Mac version is every bit as robust and feature rich as the Windows version. I don’t then Microsoft skimped a bit here, in fact I think they went all out.
In my opinion this is the best productivity software you can buy for the Mac, bar none. Sure, I suppose there are less costly ways to go to get a lot of the features here, but hey, you bought a Mac, so you’ve already paid a bit more than you’d pay for a Dell or an HP machine. I know, money is tight for a lot of people these days, but if you use your computer to earn a living, then this is a program that’ll pay for itself. If you don’t have Office on your Mac, you need it.
However, do you need it if you have the 2004 version. Maybe not. Seriously, the 2004 version does everything I want it to do and though it’s not running natively on my Intel iMac, I’d swear you’d never know. The new (2008) version seems a little snappier, but not so much that I’d spring for the upgrade. Also the interface is gorgeous, much better than the 2004 version, but still, probably not worth the price of an upgrade.
I guess that’s Microsoft’s curse, they made the last version so doggone good, that you hate to leave it and leave it I did, because when you install the 2008 version it removes the earlier version. That kind of ticked me off at first, but I don’t really need it anymore as the never version is better. But, like I said, if you have the older version, you’ll have to check the state of your wallet, before upgrading.
Rating
Microsoft Office for the Mac 2008 contains Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage and is a must have program. I was using Claris Works (how old is that) on my PowerBook, but I’m getting ready to think about upgrading to a MacBook and Claris Works won’t work on the newer machines.
Word is very intuitive and easy to use. I’ve written several letters in Word and have found it to be fast, though not as fast as that old (and I guess bare bones) software I’d been using. I do use Office for Windows on a Dell, so I really didn’t have any problems at all with the Mac Version. The interface for the two programs is a bit different and I like the Mac version better, probably because I’m a Mac person at heart.
The Windows version of Office arranges the functions with tabs, however the Mac version puts the functions in drop down windows, but the templates and Smart Art Graphics are the same for both versions and that’s convenient and I really like the My Day widget for Entourage that floats on top of the desktop. Having all my to do lists right there, that’s convenient too. I really feel like I’ve taken a step into the new Millennium with this program.
Rating
Past versions of Office installed the old fashioned Mac way, you dragged the program to your hard drive and presto, you were installed. Not so anymore. Now, like everything else in the Mac universe (the Vista universe as well) Microsoft has installed an installer program, which not only installs, but uninstalls your older version of Office. Not a big deal as far as I’m concerned, but if you use Visual Basic, you’re going to be upset, because there is no VBA in this version, but I hear it’s coming later.
As for the applications in Office, Word is the one I use most and almost exclusively, but if you’re like me, I’d recommend Office instead of Word as a standalone, as it’s not that much more and you never know when you’re going to need to use Excel. Hey, now you can balance you checkbook with it with easy as all get out (wasn’t so easy before), so you just might find you’ll use it more than you’d think.
Back to Word, I use it all day, everyday, and I wouldn’t say I’m in love with it, because to me it means work and who likes work? Not me, I’d rather be away from my computer any day, but I’ve go this bad habit I need to support, I like to eat and Word just plain simply makes it easier for me to get my work done. I’ve tried other word processors, from the nice Mellel to Apple’s Pages, but I always come back to Word. I suppose because I know and understand it. Better the devil you know. However, Word is no longer a devil. It’s pretty intuitive now. I know, shocker of shocker, hard to believe, but Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit have really cooked up a winner here. I think so anyway.
If you were a Word 2004 user you might miss all those toolbars, I don’t miss `em in the least, but if you do, you can get them back. You can make 2008 look just like 2004 if you want, but who’d want to. I like the new palettes and heck I’ve long ago learned all the menu commands, so who needs a toolbar or palette anyway?
All that said, I’m not all that pleased with the new docx which is Words new default way to save your work. I changed it back to doc in preferences. I don’t know why Microsoft did this, but I’m betting they have a secret reason that’s going to be revealed at a later day that will blow everybody away, but until then I’ll be saving in doc format so that all my work is compatible.
Entourage is another program I never use, but I played around with it and I like the My Day floating app. It’s now my exclusive calendar program and though I never used to make to do lists, I do now. I could go on raving about this version of Word, I really, really like it, but I think you’ve probably figured that out by now. In conclusion this is a fine edition of a fine product which is now more Mac like than ever. Check it out, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Rating
I have been in the military for the past 17+ years used Microsoft products on a PC since Windows 3.1 was the newest software. I recently upgraded to a Macbook Pro and was looking for a way to view work and personal files (Word Docs, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides) on my Mac. This product does all that and more! I simply love it, including the easy to set-up and use Entourage (which mimics MS Outlook). Now I can simply open Entourage and get my web-mail, keep my contacts and calendar all synched in one place. I am a total Mac convert and this was the key piece in my conversion. Also, there are three serial numbers with this product so you can load it on up to three different machines, which I already did for my Wife’s Macbook Air. Amazing, 5 stars!
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I recently purchased this product for my new mac book pro and I must say it’s been great so far. I’ve primarily been using word (class assignments) and entourage (scheduling in & out of school), which both have been impressive. This product provides you with as just as many, if not more options for whatever application you choose to use. Before buying Office 2008 for Mac, I did my research and read a lot of bad reviews, many people saying it was causing their computers to freeze or crash. I ended up going against the majority and was glad I did because I have yet to experience any problems with it. The software fits well with a mac and provides you with all the means necessary for transferring your documents over to a pc. I would highly recommend this product to anyone who is either on the fence about buying it or if they’re looking for software to help stay compatible with the pc world.
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About six months ago I converted from PC to Mac. Once I had the Mac, I had to then get some word processing software. The rep helping me recommended Iwork because it was similar to MS Office, significantly cheaper, and I could open Word documents. Having owned Iwork for almost the entire six months I can say that it’s okay but it’s just too different and basic. Too many extra steps required and to hard to re-learn how to do all the stuff I do in Word. Not to mention that when you save a file in word format it’s usually distorted when you open it on a PC using word.
Then I finally decided to give MS Office 08 for Mac a shot. It’s like music went off when I first booted up Word. Now when I open Word files I’m opening them exactly as they would appear on a PC using Office. I have access to all the familiar commands without having to go searching for them. I’ve only had the software for a week but already I’ve noticed a huge difference in my comfort and confidence when writing something.
Trust me, if you’re a convert to Mac and you’re not familiar with Iwork programs but have used Office for a substantial amount of time, I say spend the extra money and get MS Office for Mac.