Of all the applications in Office 2008, it’s PowerPoint that seems to be most directly a response to Apple’s own productivity suite. The visual facelift sits well on the app, however, and the Elements Gallery – this time giving you access to Slide Themes, Slide Layouts, Transitions, Table Styles, Charts, SmartArt Graphics and WordArt – plus fresh, system-wide clip art, make most sense here.

There are new templates, too, and they do look much better than previous efforts. They tend to be on the corporate side, but since that’s where most presentations are made, it’s not a bad thing.

The Elements Gallery makes it simple to browse and switch between themes, and the Slide Layouts tab provides a neat and accessible overview of the slide types in the theme you’ve selected; if you use multiple themes in one presentation, their layouts can be accessed in the Slide Layouts tab, filterable by theme.

What’s more, you can now more easily edit master slides, and insert placeholder areas for text and graphics; you can share templates with Office 2007 users on Windows, too.

One of Keynote’s most useful features is copied here under the name Dynamic Guides. These are snap-to guides that automatically apply to all elements on a page, so that as soon as you add a block of text or an image, you can easily align other elements to them simply by dragging them roughly into position; a narrow blue line shows you what’s aligning to what, and it can always be toggled off if you prefer to eyeball alignments.

Further continuing the theme of Keynote aping, PowerPoint 2008 now includes a command that sends your presentation to iPhoto as flat graphics which can then be synced to an iPod or iPhone; you can now use the Apple Remote to control your presentations; and you can opt for thumbnails of your slides in the left-most pane, rather than simply text descriptions. Why it took ten years for that feature to arrive is a mystery.

The presenter tools have been slightly improved; you now get a clock and a timer that can be paused and reset. Exciting stuff! (Not really.)

The Elements Gallery makes it simpler to access slide themes and types, and the SmartArt graphics will help if you regularly insert organisational charts into your presentations, but using PowerPoint still feels like a personal mission to get the bloody thing to do what you want, particularly after the joy of Keynote. Interoperability with Office 2007 is good, but unless you regularly swap files with folks using that Windows suite, there’s little here to tempt PowerPoint junkies.

Buying advice

Our overall impression of Office 2008 for Mac is that it’s a good product. Our buying advice depends on what your needs are. At the end of the day, despite four years spent in development, there are no great changes. In fact, except the new file format support, the few changes here are largely cosmetic. If you’re at home using Office 2004 for Mac, there are no pressing reasons to upgrade unless you need to translate files from a Windows machine running Office 2007 for Windows.

After picking at each of the products in turn, we do have to admit that the Office 2008 update is a better product than the 2004 edition it replaces. The cosmetic changes improve the usability of the suite. Plus, Office 2008 is now fast on Intel Macs, and the suite supports the files created by Office 2007 for Windows.

Office is relied upon by many Mac users, especially those new to Macs who like the idea of being able to use familiar tools in the Mac OS. Should you buy it if you don’t already have it? Well, iWork ’08 will also handle the same XML files that Office handles, and although it doesn’t have the clout of Excel, Pages is a much simpler and very able text editor, and Keynote, for our money, trumps PowerPoint all day long.