The word on Word 2008 for Macs

I've just upgraded to Microsoft's Office: Mac 2008. So far, just feeling my way around, trying to determine what's what with the palates and inspectors and such. The software runs natively on my Intel-based Mac, which means it's faster.

My version is the Home & Student Edition, which costs about $130 at Best Buy (and Amazon).

A big change is the word-processing toolbar atop each individual document. That seems like a good thing. Always hated that cluttered, confusing toolbar glued to the top of the screen.

The biggest upgrade seems to be the Publishing Layout, a new feature for Mac that eases preparation of pages to be used for presentations, brochures, that sort of thing. No apparent help for Web work.

Also, you're no longer able to build and run macros -- not good at all. If you work on the Internet and deal with text from a lot of sources -- especially text with Smart Quotes -- this will be a loss and a compelling reason not to upgrade. Macros will scrub and polish the text until it's ready for the Web, if you learn some simple programming. Now they expect you to create Apple Script for jobs like this, not likely for this end user. (I remember problems with macros on the last release as well.)

One more issue of note. The Word documents are saved in .docx, not the old .doc (something to do with xml and file size). People who aren't up to date with Word won't be able to open the documents. Of course Mac users are used to that sort of stuff and tend to save outgoing files as text anyway. I have a client who wants everything for his site in Word, go figure. But you can save the documents as "Word 97-2004" and get that familiar .doc

There is a lot of grousing about this release, so you'd do well to read up on the pros and cons. There are options, including Google's Docs and Apple iWork '08. I'm used to Word and wouldn't consider a downgrade given what I do.

I'll update this post in a month or so. Meanwhile, get the rundown from a real software reviewer in MacWorld's Microsoft Word 2008 review.