UPDATE: The SP1 update for Office 2008 has been made available. A bug fixing update for Office 2004 has also been released.

Microsoft is on the verge of realeasing a major update to its profesionnal Office suite for the Mac platform, Office 2008.

According to CNET News, the first Service Pack (SP1) of Office 2008 is just a few hours away. It will bring several bug fixes and improve performance as well.

The latest release of Office for the Mac has been widely criticized for its stability and performance issues as well as for the lack of Visual Basic support.

Senior Marketing manager, Amanda Lefebvre told CNET News that Microsoft is working on bringing back Visual Basic to the next iteration of Mac Office, which means that (mainly business) users who need this feature will have to wait at leat two or three years to have it, unless they choose to remain on the non Intel-native (but faster!) 2004 version.

Microsoft is also working on the release of its XML converters making it older versions of Office compatible with the latest Mac and Windows versions. These converters are scheduled for a release in June.