As January 2008 gets closer, so does the long-awaited arrival of the next version of Office for Mac.

Photo credit MellerTime (CC)

Microsoft's been holding its cards close to its chest until fairly recently, when a drip feed of information began.

One exception was that the company sensibly got the biggest disappointment out of the way very early on: there's no VBA support in Office 2008. While I understand the reason, it still seems like a big mistake. One of the biggest reasons for using Office on a Mac is to ensure compatibility with documents created by Office for Windows users. All those Excel spreadsheets with macros just won't work any more...

So Office 2008 loses the 'must have' status of its predecessors at a time when it faces greater competition from Apple's own lineup.

As I previously mentioned, I'll be looking closely at Entourage 2008 to see if it is still the right answer for me, or whether I'd be better off with the Mail/Address Book/iCal combo.

I mostly use PowerPoint to view presentations sent by other people, so I'm hoping that the long delays while images are converted for the Mac are a thing of the past. Microsoft is plugging iPhoto integration (for inserting
photos from your library, and for exporting presentations for use on an iPod or iPhone), and the ability to use the Apple Remote to control presentations.

All good ideas, but I can't see anything that would coax me away from Keynote for my admittedly simple purposes. That's not to say Keynote is only suited to simple presentations, just that the slides I use could be displayed by practically any program in the category.

The Elements Gallery looks like an interesting and usable approach to exposing and simplifying various features of the suite without doing away with the traditional menu bar. One of the biggest criticisms of Office 2007 for Windows I heard from my colleagues was that the Ribbon replaced traditional menus instead of augmenting them.

While I find myself spending increasing amounts of time in TextEdit when preparing short items, I still like to use Word's outliner mode for longer articles. While I can't see anything in Word 2008 to get me excited, the new templates and what looks like DTP-style features are sure to be of interest to those who prepare print-ready documents. Hmmm... sounds rather like Pages.

If you're not content with the official news from Microsoft, it's not difficult to find reports of the beta version. AppleInsider's 'Road to Mac Office 2008' series is one example (scroll to the bottom of that page for links to the installments), though be warned it is very heavy on the historical background. And to paraphrase the Francis Urquhart character in House of Cards, "They might say that; I couldn't possibly comment."

A few followups from last week's discussion of Leopard compatibility:

A new Skype beta is purportedly Leopard compatible, but I plan to wait for the official release.

I'm waiting for a Leopard-compatible version of e2Sync software that provides a more flexible interface between Entourage and iSync than Microsoft managed), but maybe Entourage 2008 will make it redundant.

So far, I've been unable to print onto CDs or DVDs using my Canon printer from Leopard - even though I've selected the CD tray, the printer insists on using paper instead. I've raised the problem with Canon, but have yet to receive anything but an automated response.