Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

Category: (Software)

53 new, starting at $109.00

8 used, starting at $98.00

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Editorial Reviews

Provides the basics of Office 2008 for Mac for home users and students. Whether your projects are around the house or in the classroom, the reinvented Office 2008 for Mac experience makes it easier than ever to create professional-looking work. Includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage.

Homework and Home Work will be easier than ever with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition. Get better results faster and create high-quality documents you can be proud of, with less frustration and more enjoyment.

Five Great Reasons to Get Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition:

Universal applications: Office 2008 runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs.

Intuitive interface: Reduce the time and frustration of learning new software and creating documents with visual galleries that present the right tools when you need them.

Your Mac, more compatible: Office 2008 for Mac and Windows-based 2007 Office products share the Open XML file formats and features like the Office Art graphics engine, so you'll be confident when sharing documents with colleagues, friends, and family across platforms.

Beautiful documents: Good design is a click away with hundreds of new templates, Smart Art graphics, Publishing Layout View, and professional quality clip art and photos.

Priced for home users: Don't need Microsoft Exchange Server Support or workflow management? Home and student users pay for just the features they need. Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition comes with three licenses of non-Exchange-enabled Office 2008 licensed for noncommercial computers.

Which Version of Office 2008 is right for you? View this comparison chart.

Simplify Your Work
Your presentation will make an impact. Your documents will be professional. Your analysis will be insightful. And Office 2008 will be there.
The latest version of the industry standard for productivity software on the Macintosh platform, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is more powerful and easier to use. Office 2008 combines Microsoft Word for Mac, Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac, Microsoft Excel for Mac, Microsoft Entourage for Mac, and Microsoft Messenger for Mac and lets you easily create high-impact documents and seamlessly share your ideas with others, whether they are on the Mac or Windows platform.

What's New in Office for Mac?

  • Universal versions of the most popular productivity applications on the Macintosh platform (Universal applications run natively on Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs.)
  • Microsoft Office for Mac natively supports the Open XML file formats for compatibility with Windows-based 2007 Microsoft Office products.
  • A redesigned user interface and powerful new tools for simplifying work, creating great looking documents, and exchanging ideas and information with others.

Highlights of Office 2008 for Mac

  • Office 2008 is a Universal Binary, was built by Mac users for Mac users, and includes many features which take advantage of underlying technologies of the Macintosh platform.
  • Office 2008 uses Open XML file formats for compatibility with Windows-based 2007 Microsoft Office products. XML file formats help reduce the risk of lost information due to damaged or corrupted files and also result in smaller file sizes--up to 75 percent smaller than comparable binary documents. Office 2008 for Mac is backward-compatible with earlier file formats and users can continue to use the older .doc, .xls, and .ppt binary formats.
  • Elements Gallery is the foundation of the new user interface, and gives easy access to the most commonly used tools and templates. With the new UI, you'll harness the capabilities of Office for Mac more easily than ever before.
  • Office 2008 includes OfficeArt, the powerful graphics engine also used in the Windows-based Office 2007 products. You get great cross-platform file fidelity and easy access to stunning visual and graphic effects.
  • Your words will make an impact with the modern styling of SmartArt graphics, which makes transforming text and bulleted lists into professional diagrams and graphics one-click easy.
  • A new Themes capability simplifies the process of applying a consistent look and feel across documents. Easily apply a complete set of colors, fonts, and effects to your Office 2008 documents, and change them as easily as changing your mind.
  • Automator Actions for Workflows in Microsoft Office enables you to automate Office 2008 with more than 70 pre-defined actions built to simplify your work and extend your productivity. (Available in Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition.)

Entourage 2008, the hub of Office 2008, helps it to happen, one task at a time.

Enjoy powerful new tools, over 100 designer templates, rich themes, and an intuitive user interface in Word 2008.

Entourage 2008
Your e-mails will spark ideas, you'll schedule meetings where creativity abounds. Entourage 2008, the hub of Office 2008, helps it to happen, one task at a time.

  • My Day keeps you connected to the action. Schedules, tasks, and priorities in one easy, standalone interface. Time will have no choice but to be well-managed.
  • Use color-coded categories, status indicators, and flexible To-Do list management humble even the most hectic schedules.
  • Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2008 Special Media Edition enable users to access their Microsoft Exchange server accounts with Entourage.
  • Improved Junk E-Mail filtering capabilities and phishing protection tools help shield your inbox from the scourge of junk. Your inbox will breathe a sigh of relief.
  • Projects submit to your superior management skills when you unleash the power of Project Center, With project details like e-mail messages, documents, schedules, and contacts in one convenient place, Project Center helps keep your information--and your stress--under control.

Word 2008
Powerful new tools, over 100 designer templates, rich themes, and an intuitive user interface in Word 2008 will help you to make your ideas look as good as they are.

  • When you turn blah into brilliant, Publishing Layout View will elevate the way you think about Word 2008. This new specialized and customizable workspace lets users create incredibly rich documents such as newletters, flyers and brochures without a degree in design.
  • Great looking document construction won't require a hard hat. New Templates, Themes, and Document Elements like cover pages and bibliographies make creating professional-looking output a snap.
  • Your words will make an impact with the modern styling of SmartArt, which makes transforming text into high-quality graphics and diagrams as easy as one click.
  • Dynamic Guides will help you keep all of your words and graphics in line and on point.
  • Mass mailings will have a personal touch and Word 2008 Mail Merge Manager will guide you step by easy step.

Inspire your audience's imagination with compelling visuals and engaging layout in PowerPoint 2008.

Analyze, share, and manage your data, and easily create persuasive charts and thought-provoking graphs for powerful results with Excel 2008.

PowerPoint 2008
Your presentation is a story. PowerPoint 2008 will illustrate it. Inspire your audience's imagination with compelling visuals and engaging layout.

  • Great ideas will get their graphic due with SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint 2008. Start with a blank slide or a bulleted list, and, with a click of a button, you'll have a stunning chart, table, map, or diagram.
  • Designer Themes help you give your presentation a creative look, simply and quickly.
  • The new Object Palette allows quick access to all your shapes, art, symbols, and pictures--including iPhoto files--in one easy-to-access space.
  • Dynamic Guides will help you place and resize your graphic element to create professional-looking presentations in a snap.
  • You'll lay out custom designs to showcase your unique content with custom layout capabilities in PowerPoint 2008.
  • PowerPoint 2008 integration with Apple Remote Control lets you concentrate on your words, not your keyboard. Now control your presentation and engage your audience unleashed from the podium.

    Excel 2008
    It's a numbers game. With Excel 2008, analyze, share, and manage your data, and easily create persuasive charts and thought-provoking graphs for powerful results.

    • Ledger Sheets in Excel 2008 make tracking finances, inventories, even invoices and portfolios easy with preformulated spreadsheets and automatic calculations.
    • Charting improvements artfully convey the message your data is telling. You'll see your numbers in a whole new way.
    • The new prebuilt functions tackle the most common tasks and make creating error-free complex conditional formulas easier.
    • Quick access to formulas makes functions more functional with Formula Builder in Excel 2008.
    • Your data will know virtually no limits. Excel 2008 now supports over 16,000 columns and over 1 million rows.
    • Whether you're an Excel expert or a complete novice, Excel 2008 Formula AutoComplete simplifies your calculations by providing a dynamic pop-up menu so you can select and complete your formula.

    Messenger for Mac
    Convenience is the name of the game for Mac users who want to communicate instantly with family, friends and colleagues from one convenient place. Messenger for Mac is now a Universal application, and gives you more ways to share what's on your mind or on your plate.

    Use Messenger for Mac to instantly check the status of project team members, streamline workflow by sending documents directly from Word, or offer questions or comments on document changes instantly.

    • Yahoo! Interoperability will allow personal users to connect and message with Yahoo! Messenger for Mac users.
    • Your intentions will never again be in doubt when you create your own custom emoticons in Messenger for Mac.
    • Spelling Checker is now included in Messenger for Mac.
    • Let the world know your tastes when you display your iTunes selection with the new "What I'm listening to now" feature.

Customer Reviews

Big improvement in Entourage but still major gaps

Reviewed by Paul J. Werbos, 2010-03-07

This month, circumstances forced me to do spend a lot of time trying out alternative email packages,
and learning what I could learn from others as well. (Gory details on my personal web page.) Because I need to organize a real torrent of important information, with important attachments, I used to rely on Eudora 7 for PC as the main filing systems for my work, my independent activities, including even documents.

Many folks say that Entourage for Mac is a poor cousin to Outlook -- but not any more. It's much easier to file volumes of email in Entourage 2008 than in Outlook, and the search engine is FAR better. (The filing is theoretically the same.. but having three times as big a window in "file to" makes a big practical difference.) For reasons of security, and because Outlook couldn't do the job for me, I migrated to iMac at work this month -- but in teh end, decided to go with Apple Mail with the Rocketbox add-on instead of Entourage. Entourage really does have a much better interface with Microsoft Exchange servers; it synchronizes much faster and better. Unlike Apple Mail(where I work), it has no problems uploading folders BACK to the server... which is really crucial when moving mail around. Entourage's search engine offers many more categories, as many as Eudora 7 did, and those categories were really crucial for me in the past in locating year-old documents that suddenly became critical. However -- all accounts say that Entourage's search is MUCH, MUCH slower than Apple's (and perhaps less reliable?). Apple Mail's interface for filing lots of files (and even seeing them) is much, much easier and more powerful. Filters in Apple Mail
are MUCH easier to set up than in Outlook or Eudora (though I never got to Entourage for that.)

To get more search power in Apple Mail, there is a simple fix -- the Rocketbox add-on, which may
be more powerful in the future but already fills most of the gap. Too late to matter -- I learned that
the add-on NeoPro does the same for search in Outlook. I couldn't find anything like that for Entourage.
ALL three of these leading email packages officially let you move folders easily betwen personal computer, shared drives and server -- and can be used as gmail clients, so you can get web access and high quality filing and search both - depending on how good the gmail interface is, which I don't yet know. To get email out of Apple Mail -- it probably moves easily enough from Mac to Mac; Aid4Mail gets you easily
back to outlook.

All three of these products are infinitely better than Thunderbird or "Eudora 8" for folks
who don't care whether they just lose all email and documents more than a week old.
The level of product maintenance and reliability is already decisive. (Because Eudora 7 worked
so well for me, I made the mistake of "upgrading" to Eudora 8 at home. Only Aid4Mail could rescue me.)

What I should've purchased on day one

Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Baldwin, 2010-03-06

About six months ago I converted from PC to Mac. Once I had the Mac, I had to then get some word processing software. The rep helping me recommended Iwork because it was similar to MS Office, significantly cheaper, and I could open Word documents. Having owned Iwork for almost the entire six months I can say that it's okay but it's just too different and basic. Too many extra steps required and to hard to re-learn how to do all the stuff I do in Word. Not to mention that when you save a file in word format it's usually distorted when you open it on a PC using word.
Then I finally decided to give MS Office 08 for Mac a shot. It's like music went off when I first booted up Word. Now when I open Word files I'm opening them exactly as they would appear on a PC using Office. I have access to all the familiar commands without having to go searching for them. I've only had the software for a week but already I've noticed a huge difference in my comfort and confidence when writing something.

Trust me, if you're a convert to Mac and you're not familiar with Iwork programs but have used Office for a substantial amount of time, I say spend the extra money and get MS Office for Mac.

Look elsewhere for what Office does(n't) do.

Reviewed by Chris, 2010-03-05

MS Office for Mac is alright, but it doesn't include any software that can't be substituted with free programs (Openoffice, even Google Docs).

If MS would work to create a parallel to its Windows Office suite, I wouldn't hesitate to use the Mac version. That said, a lot of what the Windows version offers simply doesn't exist for the Mac, and the programs that do exist don't work quite the same way (see most helpful reviewers comments on this).

If you're a light Office user who doesn't do more than word processing and basic Excel files, snag this at a discount rate if you want. My guess is any light user could find better, free software to do what it is they want (Openoffice will even save it in a Word format for you).

My main gripe with the Mac edition is the cost. I can get Office for Windows for half what I'd pay for the Mac version, and that includes the discounts I could receive. Why Microsoft would put this out on the market at all is beyond me, and for this price - that's crazy talk. I hope future versions include more programs and ones that do exactly what you can do on a Windows computer. Even then, I'd be hard-pressed to shell out the money Microsoft seems to want Mac users to pay for the "privilege" of using their software.

Will not install on OS 10.5.8

Reviewed by Neil Besougloff, 2010-03-03

I paid more than $100 for this software last week on Amazon.I have tried 7 times in the last three hours to get it to install. What a piece of crap. I had the free demo last summer, that worked. This says it installs but it won't launch anything, stating there is an install error. I have uninstalled it, searched for the files that the "uninstall software" somehow misses and thrown them away, too, as per lots of Mac forums where the same problem is posted. I've done this over and over. Now I have discovered that since I have OS 10.5.8, there is some sort of conflict between the Norwegian proofing software on MS Word and whether I have simple Chinese, regular Chinese, Korean, or Tibet language checked as my international preference? What the ....? So I do a custom installation without Norwegian, and I uncheck anything that looks like Chinese, Korean, etc. Still won't work. This is just nuts. And the box that the CD came in says copyright Microsoft 2009 and it was sealed, so this isn't a problem where I bought an old stock piece of software that existed before OS 10.5.8.leopard (not snow leopard). This is $100 I have thrown down the toilet. I rate this zero stars, and is it any wonder I have never bought a computer with Windows?

Office 2008 for Mac

Reviewed by Terrence Sprott, 2010-02-28

I just purchased a Mac and tried to use Macs software to run my office programs. I found it much too difficult to figure out how to make simple changes in things like formats, so I purchased Office 2008 for Mac so as to get to more familiar territory. As you can probably tell, I am "older" and not very computer literate so I must figure out how to do just about everything. I am still having some problems and don't know whether they are related to using Mac vs PC or if they are related to the change from Office 2007 to Office 2008. For instance, I am currently having a real problem try to figure out how to print an envelope. I printed one with no problem, but since then, the printing is done in the wrong format so that I only ruin an envelope. I have a hard time using the help files and the tutorials are really non-specific so that I end up just going to the drop down menus and trying to understand how each function works. I think there will be some features that I really like once I get used to them.