The verdict for Office for Mac 2008? OK, but not great
I installed the new version of Microsoft Office for Mac on Saturday and spent a bit of time with it on my flight to Boston on Sunday. (Check out the official CNET review here.) While I like the cleaner interface and some of the new fonts, overall I feel like the applications are much slower. I also found out the hard way that the default save state of .docx screws you pretty much immediately if you aren't careful. (To Microsoft's credit, you can easily change this in the preferences.)
I mainly used Word as I was afraid that Excel would jack me up. One positive for Word is that creating themes for documents has become much easier. One negative is that my documents would occasionally disappear between Expose windows and show up in the "window" menu but not on screen. Having spent a fair amount of time on a doc, I was pretty shocked when it all of the sudden disappeared.
The big thing to note is that the Mac version of Word and Powerpoint are significantly more user-friendly than the new Office for Windows. And while we all expect Mac software to be easier to use, it doesn't make a lot of sense that Microsoft wouldn't have applied the cleaner interface to the Windows product.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom. 
I would have imagined that the speed difference would be more evident given Office 2008's ability to run natively.