Office 2008 for Mac goes beta
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Mar 30, 2007 at 1:13pm
Office 2008 for Mac entered the bata phase as Microsoft works towards a late 2007 release of its overhauled Macintosh suite. “We’re in private betas right now” Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing Manager for Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (MacBU), during an exclusive interview with APC magazine.
The revised user interface is moving “in a very appealing and Mac-like direction,” the article adds. “It’s a move sure to please the thousands of Office for Mac users who became nervous after APC reported last year that the suite’s UI would be overhauled and borrow ideas from the work done in Office 2007 for Windows, which saw the menus and toolbars replaced with a single ‘ribbon’.”
At that time the Mac developers had already had one radical redesign tested and rejected after user feedback, MacBU group product manager Mary Starman told APC. “We had what we thought was going to be this perfect UI solution, and the first time we put it in the labs, no-one understood it! It was so different they were completely confused!” she said.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
