Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing Manager for Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (MacBU) confirmed to APC magazine that Office 2008 for Mac has gingerly stepped out of the alpha phase of its development as Microsoft works towards a late 2007 release of its overhauled Macintosh suite. While Jones was unable to speculate on the timetable for any public beta or the targets for RTM (release to manufacture), a demo of an alpha build showed the revised user interface is moving in a very appealing and Mac-like direction.

While there's no Office 2007 ribbon in sight, one inheritance from its Windows counterpart is the 'Escher' graphics engine which is responsible for Office 2007's dramatically improved art and charting capabilities. All of the Office 2008 for Mac applications, most noticeably Word and PowerPoint, can conjure graphics with elegant visuals such as 3D effects, mirroring, glass effects, glows and shadows. Married to the new SmartArt diagramming tools for illustrating concepts such as processes, relationships and cycles, it puts plenty of 'wow' factor at your fingertips.

Some of the most impressive touches are Mac-only treats like Word's Publishing Layout View with its DTP-style page layout capabilities. Images can be dragged out of iPhoto and placed directly onto the page with automatic text run-around, while excess copy on any page is automatically spilled into a linked text box that can be drawn elsewhere on that page or on the next page. The floating Inspector pane combines Word's formatting pallete and toolbox into a single pane which appears and vanishes with a Dock-like 'Genie effect'. Other parts of Word 2008 for Mac are borrowed from Word 2007 for Windows, such as 'document parts', which enable you to build documents by dragging and dropping elements such as headers, footers and cover pages into your existing document. Excel 2008's Ledger Sheets are like smart workbooks with pre-set financial formulae tied to formatted cell groups which use context to recognise the type of data being entered. "This is for those people who want to do financial management tasks like a cheque register or issuing invoices or managing a portfolio, but are intimated by formulae" explains Jones.