The hullabaloo surrounding the ultra-thin Macbook Air has rather overshadowed another important Mac product that was also released during the Mac World Expo in San Francisco last month.

Microsoft finally got around to launching a new version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – the first upgrade to the Mac suite for almost four years.

A lot has happened in those four years, including Apple’s decision to abandon IBM’s PowerPC processors and cosy up to Intel instead. So the biggest single change in Office 2008 is that it runs natively on Intel processors rather than using the relatively slow emulation mode that the previous Office 2004 relied on for the past few years.

Another crucial update is the use of the same XML-based file formats as the Windows version of Office 2007, which provides better file compatibility between the two platforms. The individual programs within Office 2008 - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage – get a facelift with a new interface design that follows Apple’s brushed-metal look.

The toolbar in Word and Excel is now attached to individual documents, rather than fixed in place at the top of the screen, which makes it easier to work with multiple open documents. There’s also a new feature in the toolbar called the Elements Gallery, which allows you to insert instantly a variety of additional elements into your documents.

In Word, it allows you to add items such as preformatted tables and charts, and in Excel you can quickly insert templates for invoices and lists, as well as clipart and simple diagrams. However, the Elements Gallery is perhaps put to best use in Powerpoint, where it can be used to instantly alter the layout of individual slides or apply a new design theme to an entire presentation.

Word also gets a new Publishing mode that acts like a miniature DTP program for creating page layouts. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but options such as vertical text, simple drawing tools and text-wrapping options allow you to create more complex page layouts than did previous versions of Word.

A useful new feature in Excel is the Formula Builder, which lists all the maths functions in a floating palette for easy access and allows you to type values straight into the palette rather than having to select individual cells by hand on your spreadsheet.

Finally there’s the Entourage email and organiser program, which overhauls its ageing anti-spam and phishing controls, and gains a companion program called My Day that can display your calendar events and To Do lists on screen even when Entourage isn’t running.

So far so good – but there is a gaping hole in Office 2008. Microsoft has removed VBA (Visual Basic For Applications programming language) from this Mac version of Office. It’s a potential disaster for businesses that use VBA to create macro-based documents, as it means Mac users within those organisations are left high and dry.

Microsoft will no doubt argue that Macs are rarely used in big corporate environments, so the number of people affected by this is small. However for that small number of users this will be a serious problem and might prevent them from upgrading altogether.

The irony is that Office 2008 for Mac can be recommended to home users, small businesses, students and educational users but not to the bigger organisations that rely so heavily on the Windows version of Office.