W hat’ s Ne w I n M icrosof t Offic e 200 8 Introducing Office 2008Microsoft has introduced a new version of Office for Mac OS X. Office 2008 is available for self-installation by faculty and staff using college-owned Macintosh computers. Students may purchase Office 2008 from the bookstore at an educational discount. Beginning in the summer of 2009, college-owned computers will come with Office 2008 and all ITS lab and eClassroom computers will be upgraded to Office 2008.

Cleaner LookLong gone are the days of cluttered toolbars spanning across the top of Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Office2008 now has a clean Standard Toolbar that not only pleases the eye, but also reduces clutter; these improvements make it much easier to use. Toolbars still exist within Office 2008, but they are task-specific and are only available when they are needed. When the task has been completed, they are putaway to help maintain a clean workspace.

The Toolbox

The Standard Toolbar is nice, but it does not contain a large majority of the tools that are needed when working on documents. The Toolbox (formally known as the Formatting

Palette in Office 2004) provides a tidier way to organizetoolbars in one, floating panel. The Toolbox is organized using tabs that contain formatting and design tools that are specific to a particular task or application.

You can customize the Toolbox by clicking the ‘flip around’ button and choosing what options should or

should not be displayed.

SmartArt Graphics

PDFOffice 2008 has a built-in PDF printer (not that Mac users have ever been without a way to create a PDF). To use it, choose Save As from the File menu, then select PDF from the format drop-downmenu.

Some of the most useful additions to Office 2008 are the new design tools. The SmartArt Graphics tool removes the work it used to take to assemble halfway-decent-looking diagrams. Now they can be put together effortlessly in a fraction of the time. Office 2008 also has application- specific design tools such as Styles in Word, Themes in PowerPoint, and Ledgers in Excel.

The Elements GalleryOne of the biggest visual and functional changes to Office 2008 is the addition of the Elements Gallery. This addition gives quick, one-click access to commonly-used formatting and design features such as PowerPoint themes or Excel ledger sheets. When you first launch Office 2008, the only part of the Elements Gallery you can see is a row of tabs below the Standard Toolbar. Click on any of the tabs to make the full Elements Gallery visible.

What’s New In Microsoft Office 2008Navigation Pane

The Navigation Pane in Word is a new way to view a document that is very similar to the Slide Preview Pane in PowerPoint. A page-by-page thumbnail preview of a document is provided in a sidebar, which makes it mucheasier to see what the final document will look like.

Publishing Layout ViewA new view has been added to Word that allows Mac users to finally take on print layout from within Office. The Navigation Pane is very useful when previewing your documents here, and great looking templates are easily customized using thethemes pane in the Toolbox.

Navigation Pane

Increased PerformanceIntel Mac users will notice a significant performance increase in the snappiness of Office 2008 when compared to Office 2004. This is because Office 2008 is now a Universal Binary, which essentially means that it runs natively on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

New XML File Format

Loss of VBA SupportOffice 2008 does not support Visual Basic for Application (VBA) macros. VBA macros will be disabled for any files that contain them. If you rely on VBA macros, you should not upgrade. Office2008 does support Excel Macro Language (XLM) macros. XLM macros created by systems such as Discoverer will still work in Excel 2008.

With Office 2008 comes the new XML-based format, which was introduced with Office 2007 for Windows. The inclusion of the XML file format in both Office 2008 for Mac OS X and Office 2007 for Windows means users can share Office files across platforms seamlessly, no longer having to worry about file compatibility issues. The new format also increases security, reduces file size, and decreases the chance of file corruption. This new file type comes with these new file extensions:

Word: .docxPowerPoint: .pptxExcel: .xlsx

Office 2004 (Mac OS X) users need to install the XML converter on their computers to open files in the new format. Office 2003 (Windows) users need to install the compatibility pack to open the new format. Both of these are available from the ITSsoftware downloads page at https:// www .ithaca.edu/co m puting/support/soft w are.ph p . Office 2008 users can open and work with Office 2003, 2004, and 2007 documents.