Microsoft Office is the document creation package that dominates the business world. Office 2008 is the first incarnation using Xcode, future-proofing the code-base. Unfortunately, Office remains marred by continuing bugs that Microsoft seems unable to fix, focusing instead on implementing VBA (virus basic for applications), which few people care about.

Office has been the de facto standard for interchanging documents for, oh, 20 years - as long as I have been using Mac Word and Excel. Despite its Mac heritage, Mac versions have been lacking in terms of features, stability and usability in that time. The many iterations of the code-base are to blame, no less than 4 in the last two decades, which hardly inspires confidence.

In real terms, Microsoft's MacBU could have gone for a complete overhaul of the programs, since really the only thing that needs to be compatible is the file format. They chose to maintain visual familiarity instead, which sometimes hinders program usability (remember, it works just like Word 4 or Excel 2.2). We're stuck with a 90's vintage interface when they could have reworked a good deal of the interface. After all, they did have 4 years to work on this.

Office 2008 doesn't introduce any notable new features compared to the previous version, but then, few "new" features have survived since Word 5 and Excel 3. As said, this version appears mainly to achieve future-proofing. Office 2008 does bring better Exchange functionality in Entourage, but that is for business users (see below). Entourage introduces "Projects" which helpfully boxes emails, contacts and files in a single workspace to focus you on the task at hand. Shame it's Mac only and has no comparison in the Windows version.

I'm not going to complain about the bugs. There are so many of them that despite the 7 Service Packs (to date) that purported to fix bugs you can still count on Office crashing on a daily basis. Office is also incompatible with Mac OS X 10.5's Spaces, so beware.

Is this for you? Unless you really really really need document interchangability without compatibility issues, then maybe yes (although the increasing pressure of open document standards will change this "RSN"). Otherwise, save your money and get one of office-like packages (OpenOffice, NeoOffice), or check out Apple's iWork package, which has 99.9% of the features at HALF the price.

(If it's VBA you want, stick with Office 2004!)

Talking about price: Microsoft happily continues to shaft business users by overcharging them. After all, the only tangible difference between the Home/Student Edition and the Standard Edition is Exchange connectivity (controlled through the license code). There is no physical difference in the program code or the install CD. Thus, Exchange connectivity costs you at least $140 extra (i.e. more than the price of the Home/Student Edition).