Microsoft releases Office for Mac SP2, offers free trial of full package

Fourteen months after the previous service pack (and six months after giving the world a peek at Macworld), Microsoft on Monday rolled out Office 2008 for Mac SP2. There's still no sign of the promised Entourage upgrade to Exchange Web Services (EWS), but fans of Office Live Workspace and SharePoint ought to be pleased.

Document Connection, which improves users' ability to work with documents on both of those collaboration platforms, is perhaps the biggest addition in SP2. It engendered not only a major effort to bring Microsoft's current vision of Web-based collaboration into the Mac world, but a push to get Office right with Safari 4. Those improvements are also part of SP2.

PowerPoint users made progress on issues both arcane (users can now author custom path animations) and mundane (at last, one can choose one's own default theme rather than dodging around Office's each time). The annoying PowerPoint 2008 default behavior of mirroring displays when the user jumped from Slide Show to another application can be shut off now. And -- at last -- one can double-click anywhere on a slide and simply add text.

Microsoft also claims some nice performance improvements in this edition. Writing for Mac Mojo, the Office for Mac team blog, Blair Neumann said Monday, "We took a bite out of start up and scroll speed in Word -- for example in Word's Outline View scrolling is now up to 10 times faster! We also improved calculation performance in Excel with an increased speed of up to 24%."

For Mac users not currently running Office but willing to try, Microsoft also has a 30-day trial offer going. The download is free, though users of narrower bandwidths should be advised that it's a 600 MB file.