OIT News

Microsoft has announced the release of Microsoft Office 2008 for the Macintosh for January 14th. The bookstore has ordered media and expects to have this in-stock by mid-February.

Microsoft Office 2008 provides two key features that Macintosh users will want to have. The first feature of note in this version provides native support for Intel processors. If you have an Apple running the Intel Processor, this will allow Office to run much faster. The second feature of note is that this version of Office for the Macintosh supports the new document formats found in Office 2007 for Windows. This format, called .docx, is now the default format, but Office will also support all prior versions of Office. With Office 2008, Apple users will be able to easily exchange documents with PC users using Office 2007.

Office 2008 for the Macintosh is available as part of our UMBC Microsoft Enterprise license and is available for all institutionally purchased machines. In addition, faculty and staff can use this as part of our work-at-home agreement. This will also be available in the UMBC Bookstore for Students with our special educational pricing. We don't have final pricing but expect this to be consistent with the existing versions.

In terms of functionality I was a beta-tester for Office 2008. I have found that it worked very well with regards to existing documents. One major benefit for Mac users is that the Macintosh team decided not to make major changes in the user interface as was done in Office 2007. Instead, Microsoft focused on making the application interact more consistently using the Apple user interface. Changes in Office 2008 are described on the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit blog

Some features of note:

OIT will not be upgrading our computer labs with Office 2007 and Office 2008 till the fall 2008 semester. For faculty and staff using Macintosh computers I would suggest upgrading if you have an Intel-based Macintosh. The performance improvement in running Office as a native application is very positive and the learning-curveis not that substantial. For non-Intel Macintosh systems the benefits of Office 2008 are less compelling but the learning curve is not so steep that you should not do this.

For Windows users, the learning curve for moving to Office 2007 is steeper. The menu organization for Windows has been redesigned. Many reviews state that it takes someone that knows Office 2003 a week or so to get up to speed with the new menu structure, especially if you were a power user that had memorized how to do things. OIT is working with UMBC Training Centers to offer some introductory classes on transitioning to Office 2007 this spring and summer. We will post a separate blog entry on that once those classes have been finalized.