Microsoft's application suite for the Macintosh, previewed at Macworld, is due out this fall

Logo: Microsoft Corp.

For Mac users, Microsoft (MSFT) Office, like death and taxes, is something you can't escape.

With half a billion users worldwide, programs like Word, Excel and Powerpoint are as ubiquitious as mosquitoes and as likely to draw blood. Apple (AAPL) makes its own applications suite, iWork, with programs called Pages, Numbers and Keynote that fill the same ecological niches. But to communicate with the outside world, you need to know about Office. That's why three quarters of the Macs in use today run some version of it.

The current edition, Office for Mac 2008, is big (1 GB), expensive ($399.95 for business, $149.95 for students and home) and much maligned for introducing new file formats (.docx, .xlsx) that caused endless compatibility headaches.

Compatibility was one of design goals of the next iteration, which will skip four years and be called Office for Mac 2011 when it ships next fall. We got a demo -- well, more like a peek at some static screen shots -- at Macworld. Here are the highlights:

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