Unofficially runs on PowerPC G3 Macs (like the iMac G3 in Bondi Blue) and with less RAM
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the Microsoft Officeproductivity suite for Mac OS X. It supersedes Office 2004 for Mac (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of Office 2007. Office 2008 was developed by Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit and released on January 15, 2008. Office 2008 was followed by Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 released on October 26, 2010, requiring a Mac with an Intel processor and Mac OS version 10.5 or better. Office 2008 is also the last version to feature Entourage, which was replaced by Outlook in Office 2011. Microsoft stopped supporting Office 2008 on April 9, 2013.
Office 2008 was originally slated for release in the second half of 2007; however, it was delayed until January 2008, purportedly to allow time to fix lingering bugs.[2] Office 2008 is the only version of Office for Mac supplied as a Universal Binary.
Unlike Office 2007 for Windows, Office 2008 was not offered as a public beta before its scheduled release date.[3]
Features
Office 2008 for Mac includes the same core programs currently included with Office 2004 for Mac: Entourage, Excel, PowerPoint and Word.
Mac-only features included are a publishing layout view, which offers functionality similar to Microsoft Publisher for Windows, a "Ledger Sheet mode" in Excel to ease financial tasks, and a "My Day" application offering a quick way to view the day's events.[4]
Office 2008 supports the new Office Open XML format, and defaults to saving all files in this format. On February 21, 2008, Geoff Price revealed that the format conversion update for Office 2004 would be delayed until June 2008 in order to provide the first update to Office 2008.[5]
Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is not supported in this version.[6] As a result, such Excel add-ins dependent on VBA, such as Solver, have not been bundled in the current release.[7] In June 2008, Microsoft announced that it was exploring the idea of bringing some of the functionality of Solver back to Excel.[8] In late August 2008, Microsoft announced that a new Solver for Excel 2008 was available as a free download from Frontline Systems, original developers of the Excel Solver.[9][10] However, Excel 2008 also lacks other functionality, such as Pivot Chart functionality, which has long been a feature in the Windows version. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that VBA would be making a return in the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac,[11] with AppleScript and the Open Scripting Architecture still supported.
Limitations
Error message in Microsoft Excel showing features that are not supported
Office 2008 for Mac lacks feature parity with the Windows version. The lack of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support in Excel makes it impossible to use macros programmed in VBA. Microsoft's response is that adding VBA support in Xcode would have resulted in an additional two years added to the development cycle of Office 2008.[12] Other unsupported features include: OMML equations generated in Word 2007 for Windows,[13] Office "Ribbon", Mini Toolbar, Live Preview, and an extensive list of features are unsupported such as equivalent SharePoint integration with the Windows version. Some features are missing on Excel 2008 for Mac, including: data filters (Data Bars, Top 10, Color-based, Icon-based), structured references, Excel tables, Table styles, a sort feature allowing more than three columns at once and more than one filter on a sort.
Benchmarks suggest that the original release of Office 2008 runs slower on Macs with PowerPC processors, and does not provide a significant speed bump for Macs with Intel processors.[14]
A data-compatibility problem has also been noted with CambridgeSoft's chemical structure drawing program, ChemDraw. Word 2008 does not retain the structural information when a chemical structure is copied from ChemDraw and pasted into a document. If a structure is recopied from a Word 2008 document, and is pasted back into ChemDraw, it appears as a non-editable image rather than a recognized chemical structure. There is no such problem in Word 2004 or X.[15] This issue has not been fixed in the SP2 (version 12.2.0, released in July 2009).
On May 13, 2008, Microsoft released Office 2008 Service Pack 1 as a free update. However, there have been many reports of the updater failing to install, resulting in a message saying that an updatable version of Office 2008 was not found.[16] This appears to be related to users modifying the contents of the Microsoft Office folder in ways which do not cause problems with most other software (such as "localizing" using a program to remove application support files in unwanted languages), and which do not affect Office's operations, but which cause the updaters' installers to believe that the application is not valid for update. A small modification to the installer has been found an effective work-around (see reference).[17]
Another widespread problem reported after SP1 is that Office files will no longer open in Office applications when opened (double-clicked) from the Mac OS X Finder or launched from other applications such as an email attachment. The trigger for this problem is that Microsoft in SP1 unilaterally and without warning deprecated certain older Mac OS 'Type' codes such as "WDBN" that some files may have, either because they are simply very old, or because some applications assign the older Type code when saving them to the disk. Users have seen the problem affect even relatively new Type codes, however, such as 'W6BN'. Microsoft is apparently looking into the problem, but it is unclear if they will reinstate the older Type codes, citing security concerns.[18]
Another problem with cross-platform compatibility is that images inserted into any Office application by using either cut and paste or drag and drop result in a file that does not display the inserted graphic when viewed on a Windows machine. Instead, the Windows user is told "QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture". A user presented one solution as far back as December 2004.[19]
A further example of the lack of feature parity is the track changes function. Whereas users of Word 2003 or 2007 for Windows are able to choose freely between showing their changes in-line or as balloons in the right-hand margin,[20][21] choosing the former option in Word 2004 or Word 2008 for Mac OS also turns off all comment balloons; comments in this case are visible only in the Reviewing Pane or as popup boxes (i.e. upon mouseover).[22] This issue has not been resolved to date and is present in the latest version of Word for the Mac, namely Word 2011.[23]
The toolbox found in Office 2008 also has problems when the OS X feature Spaces is used: switching from one Space to another will cause elements of the Toolbox to get trapped on one Space until the Toolbox is closed and reopened. The only remedy for this problem, as of December 2008, was to disable Spaces, or at least refrain from using it whilst working in Office 2008.[24] Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and states that it is an architectural problem with the implementation of Spaces. Apple has been informed of the problem, according to Microsoft.[25] The problem appears to be caused by the fact that the Toolbox is Carbon-based.[citation needed] Using Microsoft Office with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard solves some of the problems.[25]
In addition, there is no support for right-to-left and bidirectional languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2008,[26][27] making it impossible to read or edit a right-to-left document in Word 2008 or PowerPoint 2008. Languages such as Thai are similarly not supported, although installing fonts can sometimes allow documents written in these languages to be displayed.
Moreover, Office 2008 proofing tools support only a limited number of languages (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Swiss German).[28] Proofing tools for other languages failed to find their way to the installation pack, and are not offered by Microsoft commercially in the form of separately sold language packs. At the same time, Office applications are not integrated with the proofing tools native to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Microsoft Visio is not available for OS X. This means that any embedded Visio diagrams in other Office documents (e.g. Word) cannot be edited in Office on the Mac. Embedded Visio diagrams appear as a low-quality bitmap both in the WYSIWYG editor and upon printing the document on the Mac.
Office for Mac 2008 also has a shorter lifecycle than Office 2007. Support for Office for Mac 2008 ended on April 9, 2013. As 32-bit software, it will not run on macOS Catalina or later versions of macOS. It is also not officially supported from OS X Mavericks to macOS Mojave.[29]
Editions
Comparison of different editions of Office 2008 for Mac
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft 365 suite of software.
Microsoft Word is a word processor developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including: IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T UNIX PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SCO Unix (1990), macOS (2001), Web browsers (2010), iOS (2014) and Android (2015). Using Wine, versions of Microsoft Word before 2013 can be run on Linux.
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for an office suite, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, Object Linking and Embedding data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand.
Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine (ACE) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately.
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no longer supported or updated by Microsoft, the VBA implementation in Office continues to be updated to support new Office features. VBA is used for professional and end-user development due to its perceived ease-of-use, Office's vast installed userbase, and extensive legacy in business.
Microsoft Visio is a diagramming and vector graphics application and is part of the Microsoft 365 family. The product was first introduced in 1992 by former American software company Visio Corporation, and its latest version is Visio 2021. Microsoft acquired the assets of Visio Corporation in 2000 and thus also inherited the licensing agreements for the Visio application. A lightweight version of Visio is now included with all commercial SKU of Microsoft 365 and is known as Visio in Microsoft 365. It has two other subscription based SKUs. Visio Plan 1 includes the Visio web app whereas Visio Plan 2 provides access to both the web app as well as the Desktop application.
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Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Mac OS X. It is equivalent to Office 2003 for Windows. The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer. For this reason, it is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.
Microsoft Word Viewer is a discontinued freeware program for Microsoft Windows that can display and print Microsoft Word documents. Word Viewer allows text from a Word document to be copied into clipboard and pasted into a word processor. The last version was Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 released in 2007.
CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Alludo. It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs. It can serve as a digital painting platform, desktop publishing suite, and is commonly used for production art in signmaking, vinyl and laser cutting and engraving, print-on-demand and other industry processes. Reduced-feature Standard and Essentials versions are also offered.
The first version of Microsoft Word was developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, former Xerox programmers hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1981. Both programmers worked on Xerox Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor. The first Word version, Word 1.0, was released in October 1983 for Xenix and MS-DOS; it was followed by four very similar versions that were not very successful. The first Windows version was released in 1989, with a slightly improved interface. When Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, Word became a huge commercial success. Word for Windows 1.0 was followed by Word 2.0 in 1991 and Word 6.0 in 1993. Then it was renamed to Word 95 and Word 97, Word 2000 and Word for Office XP. With the release of Word 2003, the numbering was again year-based. Since then, Windows versions include Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013, Word 2016, and most recently, Word for Office 365.
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for macOS. It is the successor to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and is comparable to Office 2010 for Windows. Office 2011 was followed by Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac released on July 9, 2015, requiring a Mac with an x64 Intel processor and OS X Yosemite or later. Office for Mac 2011 is no longer supported as of October 10, 2017. Support for Lync for Mac 2011 ended on October 9, 2018.
Microsoft Office shared tools are software components that are included in all Microsoft Office products.
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Microsoft Office 2019 is a version of Microsoft Office for both Windows and Mac. It replaces Office 2016 and was replaced by Office 2021 on October 5, 2021. It was unveiled on April 27, 2018, for Windows 10 and June 12, 2018, for macOS, and launched on September 24, 2018. Some features that had previously been restricted to Office 365 subscribers are available in this release. Office 2019 retains the same major version number of 16 that Office 2016 had, making it the second perpetual release of Office 16. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Office 2019 on October 10, 2023. Unlike other versions of Microsoft Office, Office 2019 will only get two years of extended support, which means that support for Office 2019 will end on the same day as support for Office 2016 and Windows 10, on October 14, 2025.
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