The bMighty Blog -- Apple

Office 2008 for Macintosh is off to a roaring start, according to Microsoft. In its first four months, the software sold faster than any other version of Office for Mac, the company says. And now the software is getting better, or at least less buggy, with Service Pack 1 now available.

Office 2008 SP1 is a whopping 180MB download, but contains fixes to just about every part of Office. There are some functional enhancements as well. Here's a list provided by Microsoft of the changes in SP1:

Microsoft Office Excel
• Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
• Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
• Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks

Microsoft Entourage
• Calendar. Significant enhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence
• Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
• E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools

Microsoft Office Word
• Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading
• Document map. Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items
• Notebook layout. Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options

Microsoft Office PowerPoint
• Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
• Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
• AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

Meanwhile, Microsoft has decided - after a lot of customer complaints - to return Visual Basic for Applications to the Office suite. However, we won't see that until the next version of Office. No word on when that will be, but don't expect it within the next two years.

However, if you're all messed up because Office 2008 lacks VBA, the company worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide for automating Office 2008 using AppleScript and Automator. You can read it here.

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