Microsoft announced earlier today that its professional Office suite has reached "beta" phase and should be ready by the end of the year.

The new suite includes several new features taken from Office 2007 for Windows as well as several Mac-only features, the Macintosh Business Unit (MBU) says. Moreover, it will bring native support for the Intel architecture and compatibility with Microsoft's new Open XML specification.

However, reports claimed late last year that the next version of Office will no longer feature Visual Basic Scripting, making several complex Excel applications unusable on the Mac.