Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

What’s New in Office 2008

Microsoft gave Office 2008 significant improvements over its predecessor, Office 2004. You can’t miss the new Toolbox, Elements Gallery, SmartArt graphics, or My Day—but there’s also an array of less obvious enhancements. Here’s a list of the most interesting new features.

HAVE IT YOUR WAY: Office’s Three Delicious Flavors

Office 2008 comes in different versions for different needs—three to be exact. This book is based on the standard edition, which is now just called Office 2008 for Mac. It contains the four Office programs—Word, Excel, Entourage, and PowerPoint—as well as support for Microsoft Exchange Server for big corporations, and Automator Actions to help speed up repetitive tasks. This version retails for $400. (If you decide your office needs just one of the programs instead of all three, you can buy any one for $230.)

The Special Media Edition includes all of the above plus Microsoft Expression Media, a professional digital asset management program to catalog and organize digital photo and video files. This version goes for $500—a bargain considering Expression Media alone sells for $300.

What used to be known as the Student and Teacher Edition is now called the Mac Home and Student Edition. Now you don’t have to feel guilty about buying this low-priced edition even though you’re not a student or teacher. This version contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage but lacks Microsoft Exchange Server support and the Automator Actions. This edition contains three licenses so you can install it on three Macs—and retails at $150.

If you own Office 98 or later, you can upgrade to Office 2008 and save yourself $160 for Office 2008 ($200 for the Special Media Edition). Consult www.microsoft.com/mac for additional information.

Word

• Publishing Layout view. This new view, or working environment, is really more like a complete page-layout program within Word. By starting with one of dozens of professionally designed templates for brochures, newsletters, and so on, you can quickly create a complex document, replacing placeholder text and photos with your own.

• Document Elements. A variety of Word templates that help automate some common document-creation tasks. You can add Document Elements to any Word document to provide cover pages, tables of contents, headers, footers, and bibliographies.

• Ligatures. Ligatures are groupings of usually two letters that share common components when printed next to each other in order to improve the appearance and readability of the text. For example, there’s a common three-character ligature (ffi) in the word Office.

Excel

• Ledger sheets. No longer does every Excel spreadsheet have to begin with the daunting empty worksheet. Preformatted ledger sheets, available from the Elements Gallery, are ready to handle a variety of common Excel tasks—from simple shopping, address, or inventory lists, to checkbook registers, budgets, and stock tracking reports.

• Formula Builder. Finding your way through Excel’s forest of functions has never been an exercise for the faint of heart. The new Formula Builder helps you create formulas without having to memorize functions or syntax. You can also use it to search for functions and get detailed help on each function’s use.

• Formula AutoComplete. Now, when you type a formula in a cell, Excel lets you choose from a pop-up list of valid functions, see the proper syntax, and link to a help window to see detailed information on the chosen function.

• Improved charting. Excel’s all-new charting system has been updated with new templates and tools including special effects like transparency, shadows, reflections, and 3-D. Best of all, once you create a chart in Excel you can use it in the other Office programs, and you can always edit its data later.

PowerPoint

• Slide themes. PowerPoint comes packed with dozens of professionally designed slide themes—presentation templates with coordinated fonts, backgrounds, and effects—that you can use to assemble your presentation quickly, yet with elegant results. Slide themes are at your fingertips in the new Elements Gallery.

• Custom layouts. Customize slide layouts to precisely fit your own needs, and then save them in the Elements Gallery where they’ll be available along with the stock PowerPoint layouts. Custom layouts can contain text and image placeholders, static text and images, and background designs.

• Export to iPhoto—and iPod. Keep your presentations always available on your iPod—no laptop required! Now you can give presentations directly from a video iPod thanks to PowerPoint’s ability to export presentations to iPhoto. Then transfer the resulting photo album to your iPod, which you can then connect to a video projector, for example.

• Apple remote control enabled. If you’re giving your presentation on a MacBook, iMac, or other Mac that came with a remote control, put it to use controlling your presentation without being anywhere near your computer.

Entourage

• My Day. This standalone program lets you keep tabs on your appointments and to-do list items—even when Entourage isn’t open. And by removing the temptation to check your email, you may even get some of those 22 items done.

• Spotlight search. Find what you’re looking for quickly with Spotlight—which now can search even in message attachments.

• Enhanced junk filter. Entourage now does an even better job filtering out junk e-mail—and can even warn you when it detects phishing messages.

Office as a Whole

• Elements Gallery. Quickly find templates, charts, tables, SmartArt graphics, and so on in the Elements Gallery—located below the toolbar in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

• SmartArt graphics. Quickly create designer-quality diagrams and charts using SmartArt graphics. Use these highly customizable graphic elements to illustrate processes, hierarchies, and so on.

• The Toolbox. No more tool palette confusion! The Formatting Palette, Object Palette, Compatibility Report, Scrapbook, Reference Tools, and Project Palette now all appear under the umbrella of the redesigned Toolbox, giving you one-stop access to tools, clip art, photos, and so on.

• Improved Help. Alas, Max—the hyperactive Mac Plus help icon—is no more. In his place is a revamped Help system that can connect to the online version of Help, delivering to your desktop up-to-date new topics, troubleshooting information, links to Office discussion forums, and so on.

• XML file format. Office 2007 for Windows introduced the new XML file formats—which create smaller files and can make it easier to recover damaged file information. Office 2008 for Mac uses this new standard format for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents—though you can still open and save documents in the Office 97-2004 format.

• Universal binary. Microsoft completely rewrote Office 2008 as a universal binary program so it can take full advantage of both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs.