Office 2008, with apologies to South Park

So I have installed Office 2008 for Mac. As you can see by the swiftly created graphic to the left, World Domination is right around the corner. I just need to figure out step 2...

First, the South Park Reference... If you have not seen the episode of South Park where the “Underpants Gnomes” are stealing underpants from the boys friend, Tweak, rent it, buy it, check the Comedy Central program guide so you can see it.

The premise, as with much of South Park, is absurd. Some gnomes, that look a lot like lawn gnomes, are stealing underpants and their 3 point plan is much like the above.

1: Steal Underpants
2: ?
3: PROFIT!

Silly, I know... But using the new Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, I was able to make the above graphic in about 2 minutes. It would have been faster, but I had to pick the right colors and fonts. Office is now chock full of design elements for charts, graphics, etc... as well as many other new features. The interface has been revamped and while it still needs some improvement, I think it is far better than the last Office for Mac I used, 2004, and also much improved over the various Windows flavors of Office. What is especially nice is the uniformity of the interface. Each program looks similar to the other, but with just enough visual cues to know which program you are in without having to look at the name in the window.

Finding many tools and options that Office users are used to seeing in certain locations to be absent was probably the hardest part of getting used to the new interface. But after a very short time I have gotten used to the differences and feel very comfortable with the 3 main programs I am using. (I did not install Entourage as I feel the Mail and iCal programs that come with the Mac are more than adequate to the types of tasks that Entourage, a Mac version of Outlook for you Windows readers, handles.)

Word, Excel, Powerpoint all installed easily and work quite well. And though I have not thoroughly explored any of the applications, I was particularly impressed with the Notebook view in Word. This view gives you a tabbed notebook as your document page and allows you to type notes on whatever you need and have those different tabs be labeled for different subjects or dates or whatever you want. In fact the level of customization that exists within each application was a surprise to me as I always felt a bit stifled with what I could play with in the various Office for Windows products I have used. (Although, a lot of the customizations were available, just not in the same easy way that they exist in Office 2008.)

Once again I find myself impressed not just by a program, but by the way that the program is implemented in the Mac operating system. It looks like the Microsoft programming team really LOOKED at a Mac or two to make this version.

Tags: Mac, Office 2008