Microsoft launches Office 2008 sneak peek site

What is a shame is that from a casual glance at the preview, a significant new feature of Office 2007 is missing from Office:mac 2008 - dynamic previews. Office 2007 introduced dynamic previews allowing you to hover over a new formatting style and have the selected area preview the new formatting style applied to that area. This was achieved by a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine in Office 2007. The idea of this feature was to replace the "select area-choose format-apply-choose another format-apply" loop with a simplier "select area-hover over format-hover over another format...-apply" process. (I remember reading this on Jensen Harris's blog somewhere)

I'm guessing that a feature like this would need to be built into the system rather than added in a later beta, therefore I can only presume that Office:mac 2008 wasn't able to implement dynamic previews with a reasonable level of responsiveness.

@robert... ever hear of backups? And I'll take Entourage's single database file over a PST anyday. I've had to repair countless PST files over the years, even with backups.

As for not showing Entourage, what's up with that? C'mon, MS.. show us Entourage users what we can look forward to. I hope they don't just release this thing, finding out that there's lots of key features that are missing (ie. Palm synchronization)

As a student at BYU's Marriott School of Management, I use MS Office a TON. Certain features not available for the Mac (Pivot Charts, Access, etc.) are things I have to go to the computer lab for. If MS Office is taking away VB support and still doesn't have the other features I need, I'm just going to buy the new iWork and donate the excess to openoffice.org!

Who needs them, right? I have AppleScript, OmniGraffle, FileMaker Pro, iLife, Final Cut Express, and iWork anyways. Maybe I'll check out IBM's Symphony. Are they going to have it out for the Mac now that MS is on its way down?

I'm quite excited to see the new Mac Office. It looks like they've done some improvements, at least.
And, as a student, Notebook view is probably the best feature they ever thought of. (Makes up for the sh*tty Entourage.)

And, maybe I'm crazy, but ... didn't they already "release" these features at MacWorld last Jan?

@19 You may have light needs, but I make my living as a writer, and I never open Microsoft Word. Scrivener and Pages get me where I'm going with ease, and I just export to .rtf or .doc for the people I'm working with in the PC world. I didn't have some big "I'm not using Microsoft tools" moment, either. I've got Mac Office on my machine, I just slowly began never using it as tools better suited to my work came along.

With Google's recent addition of Presently (posted here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html)

I really can't find any reason to purchase this. Microsoft waited too long, and made too dramatic of a change of Office to make it worth my money anymore. Then again if I want an offline office suite I'll just stick to iWork, NeoOffice, or StarOffice.

I think Microsoft coming out with Office 2008 is good for Apple & the Mac Community. The more developers supporting the platform and delivering software that customer's want is great.

Personally, I am not the least bit 'excited' about the release and find a Sneak Peak Site to be kind of silly. I have very light word processor & spreadsheet needs so I may not be a typical consumer.

Any news about OneNote? I can't wait for a native OSX version.

All videos are streamed from a Youtube account:

http://youtube.com/user/MacOffice2008

@Lover (#11): As a switcher myself, I'm still in awe of the animosity shown by Mac users to PC users (and vice-versa). We're not exactly at war with Microsoft, are we? (Are we?) I switched because OS X Tiger proved to be the superior platform (something I couldn't really say with System 9 and previous).

@Mo (#14): Yes, I shouldn't have made it sound like Macs aren't taken seriously at all in academia. (They're big in education here across the pond, too.) Yet how much of the Mac's popularity in universities is due to the fact that MS Office *is* available for it. When it comes to writing a doctoral thesis, for example, only MS Office and the lesser-known Mellel have fit the criteria for a "proper" word processor.