Back to Basics-With FlairĪt the heart of Office for Mac 2008 Special Media Edition is Word 2008 (for creating documents), Excel 2008 (for crafting spreadsheets), PowerPoint 2008 (for whipping up presentations), and Entourage 2008 (for managing e-mail and tasks). You can't drop in video backgrounds or communicate with AOL or GTalk users as you can with Apple's iChat, but if you're looking for basic messaging, it does the job. Also included is Messenger for Mac, which lets you chat it up with buddies-even those who use Yahoo Messenger. Still, we'd rather stick with the more full-featured applications in Apple's iLife '08 suite. You can also add 30-second voiceovers (activated by clicking the microphone icon in Expression Media's toolbar), which gives a personal touch to the on-screen images-a very cool feature. As with most media-organization software, you can tag and rate files as well as organize them by date. The deluxe edition contains Microsoft Exchange support (messaging and collaboration software for corporate servers) and Microsoft's Expression Media software, which catalogs all of the photos and video on your hard drive. We tested the highest-end Office for Mac 2008, the $499 Special Media Edition (a $149 Student and Home Edition, and a $399 standard Office for Mac edition are also available).
