Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh nears the finish lineMicrosoft Office 2008 for Macintosh nears the finish line

For many  dare, I say, most?  business Mac users, Microsoft Office is The Killer App. There are many reasons. Chief among them is the need to share Word, Excel and PowerPoint files seamlessly with Windows users.While there has never been 100% compatibility, Microsoft Office for the Mac generally has less trouble with the .doc, .xls and .ppt files than any of the alternative Mac offerings. That was especially true with Office 2003 for Windows and Office 2004 for Macintosh; despite some oddities, such as with embedded graphics in PowerPoint decks, compatibility was certainly good enough to let people just share files without a fuss.

The biggest weak spot for most Microsoft Office for the Mac users actually was Entourage 2004, which was supposed to offer the same functionality as Microsofts Outlook 2003 for Windows. It didnt even come close, meaning that Mac users werent able to use many Exchange Server features.

File format interoperability broke down, of course, with Microsoft Office 2007 a year ago, which introduced new file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which were not supported by Microsofts Mac offerings. This caused no end of problems, which Microsoft refused to address until the release of Microsoft Office 2008 for the Macintosh.

The good news is that Office 2008 is nearly ready. Microsoft has Released to Manufacturing  RTM is the code phrase for its finished. The software will be out in two weeks, launching January 15 at the Macworld 2008 conference in San Francisco.

Sadly, Microsoft hasnt provided any public beta of Office 2008, so theres no word yet as to how well the new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage actually work, and whether theyll have solid compatibility with Exchange Server and Office 2008 for Windows. I cant wait to find out for myself.