The positives for the new Office for Mac are many, starting with the new installer that detects any previous installations of Office and can delete those you’d like removed, migrating settings where desired.

The new Word now uses docx files – the xml format used in Office 2007 – and although the friendly and useful Formatting Palette is retained and updated, the remainder of the floating palettes have become a mass of bars at the top of the Word interface that consume screen real estate.

You can minimise them using the lozenge on the right hand side, but that leaves you with Mac’s equivalent to the Ribbon interface of Office 2007.

The Mac Ribbon mostly consists of tabs within tabs; most are labelled with their intended purpose, making task-based assistance a cinch, but I found myself resorting to the Palette frequently. There’s more layout and presentation options: the new publishing layout view is found only in the Mac Office.

Excel is less cluttered in the new interface compared to Excel 2004, but it caters more strongly towards home projects, making it feel closer to Works than a powerful spreadsheet. Belying its appearance is the ability to cope with more cells, and a powerful Formula Builder for advanced calculations. There’s no Visual Basic support; it’s been dropped from Office 2008.

Powerpoint adds the ability to send a presentations to iPhoto and it’s also opted for stronger visual impact in order to compete with rival Keynote.
Entourage under Universal is far faster than the previous incarnation was under Rosetta.

Overall, although there’s added depth to the new version, the changes to the interface don’t manage a major overhaul. Increased focus on presentation is welcome, and the increased speed makes it worth the upgrade, but we wish it weren’t so expensive.