Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Installing Office

If you’ve installed a recent version of Office, you may have used Microsoft’s super-simple drag-and-drop installation—which is no more. Office 2008 now uses Apple’s Installer technology.

UP TO SPEED: Office 2008 Hardware and Software Requirements

To use Microsoft Office 2008, your computer has to meet the following requirements:

• A G4 PowerPC (500 MHz or faster), a PowerPC G5, or an Intel processor.

• Mac OS X, version 10.4.9 or later.

• 1.5 GB of available hard disk space for all four Office programs—Entourage, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. You can save disk space if you don’t install all of these programs.

• A color monitor that can show 1,024 x 768 pixels or more.

• 512 MB of RAM. (If you care about speed, more is better, of course.)

• A DVD drive for installation (or access to a network installer).

Using the Installer

The Installer walks you gently through the installation process as it checks to see if your computer is up to snuff, looks for other copies of Office, and asks you if you’d like to install the entire package or just individual programs.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: Figuring Out the Formatting

Microsoft recommends that you install Office on a hard drive that’s been formatted using Mac OS Extended (HFS +), the default format for Mac OS X. If your Mac came with OS X preinstalled, chances are excellent that your disk is already formatted in this way.

If you inherited this Mac from your cousin and aren’t sure how Mac OS X made its way onto your hard disk, check your disk’s format ...