Office 2008 for Mac hits beta: lush ‘Escher’ graphics engine revealed

Office 2008 for Mac has gingerly stepped out of the alpha phase of its development as Microsoft works towards a late 2007 release of its overhauled Macintosh suite.

"We're in private betas right now" confirmed Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing Manager for Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (MacBU), during an exclusive interview with APC magazine.

While Jones was unable to speculate on the timetable for any public beta or the targets for RTM (release to manufacture), a demo of an alpha build showed the revised user interface is moving in a very appealing and Mac-like direction.

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, said MacBU group product manager Mary Starman.

"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!"

Happily, the latest version of the UI is heading in a much better direction. Our peek at the alpha build, which Jones cautioned was still in the very earliest of stages of both the UI and backend development, showed hints of a streamlined look with a modern black sheen, at times similar to the elements in recent Apple applications such as iTunes 7 and iLife 06. Rest easy, Mac-fans -- this is not Office for Windows.

While the Office 2008 UI retains the traditional menus and toolbars, the philosophy behind the Office 2007 for Windows ribbon and general interfacelift has been applied -- to expose more of the features buried several clicks deep, and make them more visual to browse and apply.

It's sorta kinda ribbonish: these early models of the revised UI in Word (above) and Excel (below) show how some elements of Office 2007's contextual tabbed ribbon have eben applied to Office 2008's visual 'gallery'

"Part of our mission with Office 2008 is to expose all the things that are already there and make the product easier to use" says Jones. "We wanted to make it more discoverable, to bubble up the features that people didn't always find. We also have an opportunity to have a simple UI and a more intuitive interface.

"We got a lot of customer feedback (on the UI), we've kept the menus and embedded toolbars, but I can hide rid of embedded toolbars to have a really streamlined interface."

Parts of the redesign are peeking through almost every application, as well as application modules such as the notebook view in Word, and Jones promises that there's plenty to share in the months ahead.

While there's no Office 2007 ribbon in sight, one inheritance from its Windows counterpart is the ‘Escher' graphics engine which is responsible for Office 2007's dramatically improved art and charting capabilities.

All of the Office 2008 for Mac applications, most noticeably Word and PowerPoint, can conjure graphics with elegant visuals such as 3D effects, mirroring, glass effects, glows and shadows. Married to the new SmartArt diagramming tools for illustrating concepts such as processes, relationships and cycles, it puts plenty of ‘wow' factor at your fingertips.

Artful charts: Office 2008 gets impressive graphics and charting courtesy of the 'Escher' graphics engine developed for Office 2007 for Windows

There's little doubt that the high degree of polish available in PowerPoint 2007 has been influenced (for the better) by Apple's elegant Keynote presentation package, which made an impressive debut mere months before PowerPoint 2004 was released, and has enjoyed two revisions since then.

Some of the most impressive touches are Mac-only treats like Word's Publishing Layout View with its DTP-style page layout capabilities. Images can be dragged out of iPhoto and placed directly onto the page with automatic text run-around, while excess copy on any page is automatically spilled into a linked text box that can be drawn elsewhere on that page or on the next page.

The floating Inspector pane combines Word's formatting pallete and toolbox into a single pane which appears and vanishes with a Dock-like ‘Genie effect'.

Other parts of Word 2008 for Mac are borrowed from Word 2007 for Windows, such as ‘document parts', which enable you to build documents by dragging and dropping elements such as headers, footers and cover pages into your existing document.

Excel 2008's Ledger Sheets are like smart workbooks with pre-set financial formulae tied to formatted cell groups which use context to recognise the type of data being entered. "This is for those people who want to do financial management tasks like a cheque register or issuing invoices or managing a portfolio, but are intimated by formulae" explains Jones.

"If you're not an Excel guru and you don&#