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Apple: LABS GALLERY: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac SP 2 Provides Small Productivity Boost


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Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 is a facelift focused on the PowerPoint component of the productivity suite. In this version, Microsoft Word for Mac gets a bug fix for a formatting problem that occurred when numbered lists were copied into another document, and Entourage for Mac—the suite's much-maligned e-mail client—gains automated features for connecting to Mobile Me and Windows Live Hotmail accounts. None of the Entourage changes pull the product out of the ditch it's in, however—it's still an inferior version of Outlook. Here is a look at some of the tweaks made to the Microsoft tools designed to work on the Apple platform.

By Cameron Sturdevant
 
  • Default Theme
    The ability to define default themes in PowerPoint is new in this version.
  • Path Animation
    Also new in PowerPoint is the ability to add path animation to a slide. Here you see the starting and ending point for my text element "Fly this text" on the slide.
  • Incorrect Format
    Although Word is supposed to have gained the ability to retain the formatting of numbered lists, I was unable to correctly copy and paste a formatted list from Word for Mac to Word 2007 running on a VirtualBox instance of Windows XP. You see the list, but without the indentation. I was able to paste a formatted numbered list within Word for Mac.
  • PowerPoint Overcomes Calibri
    PowerPoint for Mac retained the correct formatting of a slide presentation created in PowerPoint 2007 on my Windows XP system. Here you see that both slides correctly display the text in the Arial font. Previous versions of Office for Mac sometimes converted text to Calibri.
  • Entourage Assistance
    Entourage has gained new account creation wizards to help with MobileMe and Windows Live Hotmail integration. Here you see the wizard assisting me in creating an account linked to Hotmail.
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