When you do enter charts, Excel comes to life with cells of formula, waiting for your data. Input data and the chart in Word changes form to reflect your numbers. This is all very easy. We liked the SmartArt tab too, which produces flowchart-style artwork for text to be added into.

Mercifully, font handling has improved, which has been the thorn in Word’s side. It now supports OpenType, which reduces those weird moments when your fonts change in size or type inexplicably after, say, cutting and pasting. There’s also a new Publishing Layout View, which pretends to have professional layout tools like InDesign or XPress. A floating tools palette called Toolbox removes the need for toolbars clogging up the header space, but you can still have toolbars if you want them (they just don’t float about any more).

After typing in Word for a few days, we reverted back to using Scrivener to type this review. For pure text work without charts, we find it more Mac-like and intuitive. In comparison, Word feels bloated and a little clumsy.

You don’t need 30 tools standing by, just in case you need to cycle through SmartArt graphics options, or Track Changes, or alter the background colour behind the text. You want those tools hidden until needed!

Minimising the tools is possible, but the toolbar stays thick and weighty. Even if you switch Word to full-screen, which bizarrely doesn’t spread it over your entire Desktop, you still have Elements Gallery above a row of possible graphics inserts and a compressed space beneath it to type in. To work effectively, we removed open toolbars, stuck with just Elements Gallery and had the Toolbox palette floating off to one side, but we needed to do this each time we fired Word up.

Grumbles aside, we prefer Word 2008 to Word 2004, just because of the easy way of inserting charts and graphics.

Excel

Let’s move on to Excel. This is a great app, but there are so few changes to Excel 2008 for Mac that we can’t see why the casual user needs to upgrade. Things are different, however, for business folk on the Mac.

The same XML argument that justifies upgrading to Word 2008 for Mac is also true for Excel 2008. Microsoft has updated the default file format to XML, as with Office 2007 for Windows. As Excel 2004 for Mac can’t handle these files, people who send and receive files from Windows users are forced to upgrade, just to get along with their colleagues.

Feature-wise, there’s nothing really new to learn. There is a brilliant new Formula Builder tool in the Toolbox palette, which automatically suggests formulas that might be handy and writes them for you, so life has become easier.

Avid users of Excel on a Mac, on the other hand, who work with advanced macros to automate parts of their ledger sheets, are not so lucky. Excel 2008 for Mac doesn’t carry support for Visual Basic, which is the language Excel 2004 for Mac and Office 2007 for Windows both use to create these fiddly macros. Files including these macros are shut out of Excel 2008, so any Mac users who rely on macros in Excel can’t really move forward. We doubt this will affect many people – if you’re a true Excel geek you’re probably running Windows anyway – but for some, this little nugget simply torpedoes the viability of Excel 2008.

Elsewhere, the suite-wide Elements Gallery makes using charts and artwork easy, just like in Word 2008. Putting Microsoft stock ‘artwork’ into a spreadsheet didn’t hold any appeal, but charts can look good. That said, after plopping charts into several sheets, we preferred the look of them in Word. Excel overlays charts on top of the cells, which offends our Mac sensibilities!