“This is a really big release for us,” Geoff Price, Product Unit Manager for Office 2008 for Mac at Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, told Macworld. “We are moving with Apple as it moves forward with its operating system.”

Office will be available in three versions: Office 2008 for Mac ($400; $240 upgrade), Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition ($150) and Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition ($500; $300 upgrade).

When it arrives on U.S. retail shelves later this month (with international sales to follow), Office 2008 will sport a number of new features, not the least of which is the ability to run natively on Intel-based Macs. But from Microsoft’s perspective, some of the most important features in the latest version of its massive productivity suite have already been in place for some time.

As is the custom at Microsoft when developing software updates, members of the office team hit the road to talk to customers about what they wanted to see in the next version of Office. One of the things they noticed noticed is that loyal Office users were often unfamiliar with all the features of the product.

“One of the goals for this release was to allow people to rediscover the power of Office,” said Microsoft’s Han-Yi Shaw, lead program manager for Word, Compatibility, and User Experience. “Sometimes we get requests from power users for features we already have.”

To overcome that, according to Microsoft product unit manger Eric Wilfrid, the company’s Mac Business Unit designed Office 2008 to allow users to create a variety of documents quickly regardless of which Office application they’re using.