Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac SP2 released

Promises to be faster, and more reliable

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20 July 2009 20:57 GMT / By Stuart Miles

While Microsoft has confirmed that it won't be bringing Office 2010 to the Mac at the same time as the PC version, that hasn't stopped the company launching Service Pack 2 for Office 2008 for Mac.

The new 182.6MB update that takes 268MB of your hard drive is, says Microsoft, "designed to improve the Office 2008 experience where it matters most to customers: speed, stability and compatibility".

New to the suite is a new tool called Document Connection for Mac, which helps improve access and browsing to documents on SharePoint Products and Technologies and Microsoft Office Live Workspace, while the company has also said that a number of bug fixes and stability issues have almost been addressed.

According to the software giant, most of the applications get a speed boost including Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac (launch and scroll times) as well as Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, with features such as calculation performance.

In lieu of full web access as is found in Office 2010, the company has added Document Connection that lets users save and open documents to Microsoft Office Live Workspace from Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

In addition, the Microsoft Office Live Workspace announced expanded Mac browser support to include Safari 4 along with existing support for Firefox 2.0 (required for Mac OS X 10.2.x or later).

The new update, which is free to current Office 2008 for Mac users, is available via an automatic download or software update within the application.