Microsoft unveiled Office 2008 Service pack 1 for Mac today. The sp1 is going to optimize the performance, stability and security for Office applications. Office 2008 was launched at the beginning of this year at the Macworld Expo 2008. The Redmond company made a good business with a strong market performance of Office 2008. Customers can download the update for free from here.

The Mac BU developed Office 2008 to help Mac users simplify their work with a Mac-like interface, tools to easily create professional documents, and, most notably, the most cross-platform compatible suite on the market for the Mac.

“The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004. As we set our course for future versions, we are working closely with customers and we’ll also expand our staff to ensure that Office for Mac remains the most powerful and compatible productivity suite for Mac customers,” said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft.

The additional features for service pack 1 are as follows:
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 re occurrence

• 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

Microsoft will bring Visual Basic for Applications back to the Mac platform in a future revision of Office, in addition to the current Automator and AppleScript support initiatives. The move comes from Microsoft in recognition that users require cross-platform macro compatibility, since Windows users can not use the previously mentioned scripting methods.

Courtesy: Gizmodo.com

Skitch, an application (currently for Macs only) that lets you easily capture and gloss over photos and share them with friends through web (on your myskitch page), by mail, Bluetooth or just by saving the image to your hard drive. Skitch offers different ways for getting images: you can take snapshots , take a photo through your camera or work on any photo on your hard drive or on the web by dragging it into Skitch.

Plasq developed Skitch (currently in beta version), the evolution (or perhaps revolution) of screen capture to the Mac.

The highlights of Skitch features are:

• Snap a website
• Capture a chat moment
• Screenshot an application
• iSight snap
• Quickly sketch an idea
• Tap into your iPhoto Library

Once opened Skitch adds it’s friendly heart to your menubar. Once clicked you can transform your cursor to crosshairs and quickly select an area of your screen to import into the Skitch application. You can also use Skitch to capture images from an iSight camera for modification and sharing.

Once the image is within the smooth metal frame, Skitch provides you free to use smart tools to mark it up. Adding lines, arrows, circles, squares, and text is possible in the color of your choice. Because Skitch stores all these annotations as vectors in a separate layer it’s easy to select a previously created object and modify or delete it without harming the original image below.

Skitch includes an internet service that makes sharing one click easy. Clicking the webpost button in the lower right hand corner of the screen uploads your Skitch to your personal mySkitch page for easy sharing with your friends and colleagues via a simple URL.

Skitch keeps a local copy of all your creations for easy later reference. A quick click on the history button in the upper right hand corner of the window takes you over to a grid based view of all your previous Skitches.

Skitch is a slick application that makes a common action like sending someone a screenshot easy, slick, and fun. Skitch falls into the category of applications that you never knew existed, but once you use it you can’t imagine how you lived without it.

Source: Sparky