Apple Insider, who run great 'Road to' series' are doing it for Office 2008, which some might find interesting. Here they are:

An Introduction

Installation and Interface

Pages vs. Word

Excel vs. Numbers

Powerpoint vs. Keynote

I will try and update this again, as I did with the Road to Leopard Series.

Personally, yuck! I wouldnt go anywhere near this....check out this screenshot! Bloated and extremely confusing interface just like Office 2007. With the beauty that is iWork '07 I wont be touching this, perhaps for Excel if I need scatter graphs next year and Numbers doesnt have them by then.

I agree. Total mess.

Office looks more and more tired and bloated with every release. Bring back Word 5.1!

Why on earth is there is a messenger icon on there!!! What a joke!

It seems like it is going to be too much like the crime against humanity that Office 07 for Windows is (excluding OneNote). It took one of my friends 20mins to figure out that to save something you have to click the big ugly windows logo that looks like it is there for decoration

When will MS take some classes in usability...give them a copy of iWork, Skitch, EasyCrop, iLife etc. and tell them to make it as easy to use as that!

Incapable of customising the interface are we? Most Office using folks that I know invest 45 seconds in arranging the toolbars.

Don't get me wrong - I am no MS lover. I am on the office 2008 beta though. iWork, etc is absolutely fantastic for home/soho applications, but has significantly less functionality than that required by professional technical writers delivering commercial documentation.

Agreed, I use iwork at the moment, but will definately go to office 2008 once it comes out of beta.. so by 2010 :P

To me it should work the other way around. It should have a minimalistic approach out of the box with users able to add what they want if they need more...that is what iWork has. Look at Office 2007 for Windows...its just a mess to look at.

I see no reason to upgrade at all...I have all that I want and more in iWork. If they included OneNote in the package perhaps...

What I like about Mac Office 2004 over the Windows version is that the toolbars and document window are separate. It's not all contained within one window.

Judging by that screenshot, they've gone and made it a one-window app. Ugh.

Still, it doesn't have to be as bad as that - the article says you can get floating toolbars back, and all it retains in the document window is the 'home row' toolbar. So you can have something like this:


which doesn't look too bad at all, really.

You are one of around 10% of users that require the additional features that word offer, the other 90% do not the added blot of office, nor do they ever customise the toolbars, most users install it because they are told by hardly normal or some other ripoff pc shop that they need office so they pay an ungodly amount for software that they would never use more then 10% of, when infact open office would handle their needs, they end
up paying for clipart.

There seems to a story about office 2008 ever other week but is their a release date yet??? I always laugh that the large software company in the world take so long to produce anything.

Since numbers I have no need to install office on my macs

Well, according to the Mac Office blog, they're heading for a mid-January release date.

Has anyone found out of Office 2008 for Mac has anything like the "Save my Settings Wizard" that Office 2003 on Windows has?

I've found this very helpful for backing up my work system Office configuration (it takes a bit more than 45 seconds to customise Office to my liking) for the inevitable times when I need to reinstall Office later on.

Just added Pages '08 vs. Word '08. A very comprehensive article. I am almost tempted over by the citation manager built into word...

You use Word for technical writing? Eww! It's a shame Adobe has ditched FrameMaker for the mac

Ah well, works fine in Parallels/Fusion

Just added Excel vs. Numbers which may interest those of you who use spreadsheets on a daily basis. To me as someone who uses spreadsheets for making things that can be/need to be half pretty and not a lot of advanced features, Numbers still wins hands down. How can you resist iWork graphs!

Just updated with Powerpoint vs. Keynote. Some key quotes:

Haha

Thought I'd bump this thread.

ArsTechnica have a preview/review (?) for 2008. It's rather good. Can't say much about the product though, but the conclusion seems interesting.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/...8-review.ars/1