Neo Office is great, the best alternative to Microsoft Office for Mac OS X out on the market as of now in my opinion, or at least for now. With the release of some sneak peeks from Microsoft, we can see what the Mac Mojo team has really been working on for the past three years or so, and from what I see, it looks stunning. So sit back, enjoy the eye candy, and put your stunner frames on as you take a look into Microsoft Office 2008……for Mac! *end of dramatic effects* Note: I am not an M$ fan boy in anyway, just an impressed user who sees what good can come from hard development.

**Click to enlarge the images

Element’s Gallery

In Office 2004, a handicapped program was released with the Office package to manage projects, templates, and looks to the the rest of the Office suite, called Project Gallery. It was a small mix of just about everything, and didn’t seem to fit in at all. In 2008, Microsoft abolished this, and placed the “Element’s Gallery” under the color specific toolbar *blue for Word, Orange for PowerPoint, etc* under the standard Mac OS X toolbar. It supports CoreAnimation like actions, and really does look good under the potentially crowded interface.

100% Cocoa look

Let’s face it, Office 2004 was somewhat Mac like, but it looked terrible with a disconnected interface of toolbars and the formatting palette, not to mention the main document screen. The worst part was it behaved unlike a Cocoa application. In 2008, Office looks like one of the iWork apps, no joke, it looks that good. With the combination of color coded menu bars with a beautiful glossy look, plus new found Cocoa treasures like HUD windows? This is looking hard to beat..

Word

Word is probably the most used application in the Office suite. Since 2004, Microsoft has abolished the 3 or 4 toolbars and replaced with a unified, standard Mac OS X toolbar, sporting the usual buttons of New, Open, Zoom, Undo, Redo, etc. From the screenshots it can also be seen that it looks like Word is going for more of a templated text editing, instead of the build-your-own format standard.

Excel

Excel looks similar to the structure of Word, with the position of toolbar items, menu bars below the toolbar, etc. It looks as though once again it comes with more of a templated appearance, with many to choose from from the Element’s Gallery.

PowerPoint

Powerpoint once again shares the similar structure of Word and Excel, but has a sportier presentation slide side bar showing the new and preferred look of them. *dark or light blue with options on bottom*

Entourage

Entourage does not seem to be on a very high priorty list on Microsoft, as they have not really expressed any new features for the personal management client other than this new colorized panel of tasks related to other Office documents. You can also see from the screenshot below they have abolished the four cubed page options in the top left of the window to Segmented Controllers in the toolbar.

Big changes are around for Leopard, and it looks like Microsoft is taking the lead for this new release of OS 10….surprisingly, as they have not always been known for being speedy on releases, especially of there Mac software.