Office 2008 for Mac goes beta

Posted by Dennis Sellers Apple ico Mar 30, 2007 at 8:13am

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.



Leave a comment ⇒

Please post the article topic & comment in our forums. No registration required.








Article Information

Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This

Contributor

Contributor

Dennis Sellers

Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 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.

Recent Articles