Office 2008 for Mac Status
Last updated 2/28/08
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is now available for individual sales at the University Store, Computer Sales. The discounted price for the media is $30. Departmental copies will be available in March or April.
Support
Computing Services offers support for Microsoft Office products on a best effort basis only. The exception to this is the Entourage (Mac) and Outlook (Win) mail clients which are supported for use on campus.
Note: Initial testing of Entourage 2008 indicates that it functions properly with our campus mail servers; however, extensive testing has not been performed.
Cautions
New File Format
Office 2008 and 2007 use the same file format. The new file format can be identified by the addition of an “x” at the end of the extension. If the document contains Macros and was saved in a Macro enabled format, it will be identified by the addition of an “m” at the end of the file extension. For example, Word 2008 would now be saved as “assignment1.docx”, Excel 2008 spreadsheet as “assignment1.xlsx”. If the document contains Macros, the extension will be “assignment1.xlsm”. Similar rules apply to other components of Microsoft Office.
Saving as an older version is advised if you are sharing Microsoft files (e.g., Excel, Word, PowerPoint) with others or using the file on a cluster machine. Files saved as 2008/2007 format will NOT be readable by those with older versions of Office.
To save your file as an older version (e.g., Office 2004/2003), do the following:
- From the File menu, select Save as. Then, select the version from the Save as Type drop-down menu.
Clusters
Office 2004/2003 will be available in Computing Services' clusters for the remainder of the 2007-2008 academic year.
Documentation and Training
System Requirements
If you plan to run Office 2008, first discuss it with your departmental administrator or DSP consultant. The following is required to run Office 2008:
- Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (500 MHz or faster) processor
- Mac OS X version 10.4.9 or later
- 512 MB of RAM or more
- 1.5 GB of available hard disk space
- HFS+ hard disk format
- DVD drive
- 1024 x 768 or higher-resolution monitor
For specific machine requirements, see Microsoft's System Requirements for Microsoft Office 2008.
