Got a demo of Office 2008 for the Mac at Macworld today. There’s no fancy ribbon interface like the new Windows Office, but instead an “elements gallery” with animated scrolling access to various menus. It’ll be available “in the second half of 2007.”
Sheridan Jones, group marketing manager for the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit, said the idea is to “open up the power of these applications and make things more discoverable,” with Mac-specific templates for newsletters in Word, ledgers in Excel, and a day planner widget (except it’s not a widget, it’s a separate app) for Entourage. Whoo, templates! Those will really come in handy for us dumb Macheads.

Screenshot below the jump: