Here's the key: it looks like Excel from Office 2003, 2007 or 2008 (Mac). All your tweets are displayed in plain text down down the page, and you tweet by typing yours in the top textbox and hitting send. There's even tabbed views along the top, making it a relatively complete Twitter package.

And don't forget to follow us if you haven't. And yes, pork rinds and STDs are what my friends tweet about. [Spreadtweet via NYT]

All editions include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. The $400 "standard" edition also has Microsoft Server Exchange support and Automator actions. The $500 Special Media edition has all of that plus Microsoft Expression Media, formerly iView, a program for managing and processing vast batches of 100 different media types.

If you're a cheapskate with a conscience like me, though, you'll be happy to hear that the former "Students and Teachers" edition has been renamed "Home and Student" edition. That means you can pay just the $150 for the four key programs without making up some excuse that you're going back to school for some sort of "adult education."

The biggest advantage of the new Office is that it runs great on the MacBook Pro. After experiencing some crashiness with the old Microsoft Word, I decided to make iWork my default word processor, but compatibility still takes an extra step (you have to Export to Word). My wife is an Office for Mac veteran, and while she hasn't experienced too many stability issues with Word, she finds instability when working in the old PowerPoint, especially with Excel data. She's committed to Office for the long haul, never gonna touch iWork, and I like Office features, like that damn style paintbrush, which comes in handy when you're doing a lot of cut-and-paste. So in my house, a new Office arrival is good news indeed. Needless to say, this Office suite, even in beta, has been nice and stable to date.

My favorite new feature, one of those Mac-only treats, is My Day, which goes with Entourage but is a free-floating purplish-blue standalone app. It is what it sounds like, a little calendar that show you what's on tap. But you can add To-Do's directly to it, and check them off as you go through your day, almost like it was scratch paper. I can use all the to-do I can get, and this has been a big help.

I have to say that when Office 2007 for Windows came out last year, I was a little miffed by the tab interface. I was happy to see that Office 2008 for Mac doesn't follow suit. As you can see from the Word screenshot above, you still have all the familiar ways of finding things, as well as new animated tabs for adding graphics, tables and all sorts of other stuff.

PowerPoint users like my wife will be happy about compatibility with Apple Remote and a "send to iPhoto" feature that save slideshows directly to iPhoto for auto-syncing with an iPod.

Excel nerds get their patience rewarded with more than 1 million rows and 16,000 columns, equal to that of Windows Office 2007. Also, there's a new Formula Builder for people like me who need a little help inserting calculators and stuff. (Usually I just call my wife, who's a total Excel freak.)

As one of the last living humans who uses Hotmail, I was glad to see that the new Messenger for Mac 6 was integrated into the suite. I don't use the messenger (the Mac version doesn't really pack much in the way of multimedia messaging) but I like having the rapid-fire new-mail notifications.

I wish I could say the same for Hotmail support in Entourage. It's sad, but when I loaded up my account info, it downloaded 474 of my oldest emails and refused to go any further, leaving something like 30,000 messages stranded on the server. I inquired about this, as part of my zeal for the new Office was having a pleasant way to manage Hotmail on the Mac. All I got was the cold hard fact that nobody in Redmond cares about Hotmail anymore. The official word: "Improved Hotmail functionality in Entourage was not a main focus for the new version." Don't worry, Hotmail team—wherever you are in that nest of cubicles, fire off a flair and we'll send someone to rescue you. Office is a massive suite, and I haven't had the time to explore every nook and cranny yet. I can say that I will be using it going forward, and will investigate any issues that arise. I know many of you already have the beta. Well, now that you're free to talk about it (trust me, you are), I'd like to encourage you to share your comments below—maybe you've discovered some dark underbelly that we haven't found yet. [Mac Office 2008; The Three Editions]

First up is the standard version, the one that's called Office 2000 for Mac, and that has PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Entourage on board for $399. For $100 more, you can get the Special Media Edition that adds Expression Media, which lets you catalog your music and videos. Then there's the slightly crippled Home and Student version for $149, and it won't let you use its Exchange and Automator functions.

This'll be the first Office for Mac that runs natively on Intel Macs, but not to worry, it'll still run on those moldy old PowerPC Macs, too. Let's just hope Microsoft doesn't change the .doc file format in this version like it did in Office 2007, which can be worked around but is still a pain in the ass. [CNET]