Hello everyone, I thought this would be good time to jump in and introduce myself. I’m the Director of Marketing and Planning for MacBU – a longtime ‘softie and closing in on my first anniversary in the Macintosh Business Unit. Like most of us in MacBU, I’m a long time Mac user – and this will date me...

Here’s the latest official word – Office 2008 for Mac has Released to Manufacturing (RTM)! We’re very pleased to announce that the product team has signed off, and our final build has left the building and is en route to manufacturing sites abroad. Needless to say there’s some joy in MacBUville, with...

In my Calendar post , I touched on some of the work we’ve done in our Entourage 2008 reliability focus. I’d like to continue that discussion today with some details about our efforts in another critical area, the Entourage Database. Apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Rules definitions, signatures), essentially...

PowerPoint is a communications platform at its core. We communicate ideas powerfully using PowerPoint in the board room, on the desktop, in the classroom, in the elevator, and on the go. Wait. Did he say "In the elevator?" Sure, let me just pull out my Mac Book real quick and fire up PowerPoint for...

BFD! Big Friday Deals. Best Friday Destinations. The mall, online - wherever I can find them, I love a bargain. And there is no better bargain-hunting day than Black Friday , the day after Thanksgiving. En masse, we will drag our L-tryptophan dosed selves off of our couches and into the crowds in search...

+ Click here to enlarge Apple’s newest version of Mac OS X , called Leopard, was released into the wild at 6pm local time on October 26 th . I’ve seen a number of people asking about how compatible Mac Office is with Leopard, and I thought I’d chime in to say a few words about it. One of my roles...

There is a new tool in town… the Object Palette. This new tool lives in the Toolbox and allows you to quickly find and insert images into your document. The OP, as it is nicknamed, is designed to provide quick access to the following commonly used objects: Shapes Clip Art Symbols Photos (from your iPhoto...

I use Office every day to communicate – email, documents, presentations, spreadsheets. I like to use visual aids to improve my communication -- it’s invaluable to reinforce your ideas with graphics, and if it looks cool, even better. How do you take a textual concept and quickly show your meaning in...

In my previous post, the focus of attention was our new Office 2008 User Experience. For this post, I will turn the focus to another area that I am deeply passionate about --- Microsoft Word 2008. At MacBU, many of us have the great fortune to work on multiple areas of interest. So when I’m not “pushing...

Last Wednesday was our general “ZBB” target for the Office 2008 project, a major milestone on the road to release and something we’ve been pushing hard for over the past several months. We saw some fantastic surging by the development team to clear out backlogged product issues late into Wednesday night...

The Toolbox is a useful new collection of tools that was introduced in Office 2004. The primary concept was to prevent the possibility of many palettes being opened at once causing a window management problem for users. In general, it worked fairly well, however, it often collides with the Formatting...

Did you know that someone once wrote a book entitled How to Lie With Charts? It’s true; check it out . The book was a tongue-in-cheek welcome gift when I took over Excel program management. Truth be told, I haven’t read it. It could be quite good; the reviews on Amazon.com would suggest that it is. Maybe...

You’ve been reading about our goal to make great looking documents easier in Office 2008, and this includes the document graphics you use to express ideas and emotions. The Art of Office is a reminder that picture formatting and drawing tools are well-established in the Office suite, but Office 2008...

So the cat is out of the bag! This morning, as the doors to Apple Expo opened, we officially announced the availability of Office 2008 worldwide from January 15 (dates will vary by markets). As part of the announcement, we also announced a new “Nordic Pack” that will include localized version of Danish...

Amanda Lefebvre and I are here at Paris Expo - we're just ready to go over to the show floor now for the first time,and today we'll be talking to folks from Macworld UK, MacUser, MacFormat, ZDNet France and some other French outlets too, not to mention lots of customers.! Nous ne parlons pas beaucoup...

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines evolution as 'a process of change in a certain direction'. Software evolves, too. You can see some of the evolution of software when you compare one release of software to the next. The software that you see in the wild is the product of a series of evolutionary...

Installation is something that the average user doesn’t have to spend too much time thinking about. They pop in the cd/dvd, go through a few screens (most often just clicking the continue button without making any changes) and more often than not things go pretty smoothly. However, for IT admins, installation...

I travel a lot. I'm in and out of our Seattle and Mountain View offices on a regular basis and spend way too much time sitting on the airplane. One of the most frustrating things about using Entourage 2004 is that every time I travel, I have no easy way to indicate to folks e-mailing me that I am unable...

We announced today that Office 2008 for Mac will be released to manufacturing (“RTM”) this December, which will allow for retail availability in the US in mid-January (planning for Macworld), and allow us to deliver Office 2008 to our volume license customers and global customers in the first quarter...