The best office to work in is the Microsoft Office. About a decade ago, everyone was producing “suites.”

These were collections of programs designed for general business. Although competitors continue to come

out there is still only one champion.

All Hail The Office!

The Office, in this case, is Microsoft’s Office for Mac 2008. It is the first redo in four years. Its earliest introduction, back in the last century, marked an interesting marriage between the former blood enemies of Mac and Windows, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, if you will. Some of you may recall a TV movie called “The Pirates of Silicone Valley” which told the story of the personal rivalry which played out as competing operating systems for desktop computing.

Interestingly enough, many Windows people became jealous of their Mac brethren because they felt that certain elements of the program ran better on Apple than the Windows edition. That feeling still exists to some degree today.

Office became a common bond. It allowed that everyone wants a simple business system that we all can communicate with. Its basic elements are Word, which has become the universal word processing program, Excel, which is everyone’s spreadsheet of choice and PowerPoint. PowerPoint has become a generic lexicon term for any computer video presentation just as every copier is called a Xerox. The days of overhead projectors and slide shows ended when the beauty of a good PowerPoint presentation turned everything else into dinosaurs.

Still, PowerPoint has not stood still. Mac integration includes connection to Apple’s iPhone and iPod photo files. It now also works with the Apple Remote Control. Improved Presenter Tools have been introduced with this release, which means the new stuff is not available to Windows Office users yet.

The Office includes other, not as popular programs such as Entourage. If you already use Palm desktop or some similar origination program, especially if it loads into your PDA (Blackberry, Trio, Palm, etc.) than Entourage, with its To-Do list, Calendar and even the new My Day feature, seems redundant. Entourage also works as an e-mail generator, giving you the power to add photos and graphics to your daily electronic correspondence. They have also improved the filtering of junk mail and phishing.

Note here that phishing is the online fraud technique criminals use to get your personal information. You never want to give out your account numbers or passwords.  Remember that the interior minister of Nigeria does not want to send you any money. You have not won the FedEx lottery. And the widow from North Korea does not want to marry you to bring her millions into the States. (I have all of these and more in my files.)

Excel, on the other hand, has had some fierce competition over the years. Linda Russell, The (certified) Quick Books Queen of the Inland Empire has told me that for bookkeeping and accounting, as well as tax prep, there are actually several better programs available. Not just QuickBooks, she tells me, but Quicken as well. Ironically, Microsoft Money does a better job according to Russell. The key elements, she says, have to do with reconciling accounts. If you write a check to pay a credit card, you need a program that shows the complete transaction.

Still the new ‘08 edition of Excel has added some useful elements for charting, graphics and templating of work. It can now support work of over a million rows and 16,000 columns--- powerful stuff!  It also has a new function called the Elements Gallery, which follows my first Law of Diminishing Technology. This law states that what used to take five steps in the first version, takes fewer with each new release. One button lets you chose from pie, donut, bar, bubble and other chart forms.  It also has formula functions built in. Type “subtract” and it gives you a list of formulas to pick from.

Word is perhaps the least changed of the Office programs. True, it has a new Notebook Layout View, which is great if you take your laptop into a meeting and take copious notes. There is a Chart Manager, which probably manages charts. I have never figured out Mail Merge, but it has been improved in ‘08. It has simplified the process to help us novices with a new step-by-step path.

There is also a Citations Program, which helps you on style rules for specific documentation, such as Modern Language Association or Associated Press style.

Messenger is another program in the Office package. It works in conjunction with those whose lives are taken up with “texting.”  This is made even easier by Messengers public IM support. Of course, it can also be useful for legitimate team projects and other close group projects. Still, study halls across America have people sharing iTunes selections and test questions even as I write this.

The single most impressive thing about the Office for Mac is that so many other suite programs are being described as just like Office or as good as Office. Like those old BMW ads, you have to ask yourself, if everyone is comparing themselves to Office, shouldn’t you just get Office.

This is especially significant when you realize that Apple has produced a new package called iWork 08. Its Keynote 08 is a “Cinema-Quality” presentation program designed to compete with PowerPoint. Pages 08 is the new Apple word processing program. Numbers 08 is, of course, the Apple spreadsheet program. Reviews of iWorks have compared it, naturally, to Office. Some have even said that certain points are better.

Myself, I am reminded of the old AppleWorks, which began as ClarisWorks. These were also “suites” with word-processing and spreadsheet and presentation packages.  Office dominated then, and thanks to its ability to cross between Mac and Windows it has achieved a communications like that has, if this doesn’t sound to pretentious, a true brotherhood of computer communications. If there is a problem at all, it is in communications.  For some reason, Office documents that I send over AOL often will not open up on the other end. This may be a conflict with AOL, which has a lot of conflicts these days. It may be that the new Office 08 is just too cutting edge for old twentieth century beige computers which just can’t keep up with today’s technology.

Well, somebody out there probably still has an old dial phone, too.