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Microsoft Office 2010 beta review

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By Simon Jones, 18 Nov 2009

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The beta of Microsoft Office 2010 is now available for the public to download. We find out what’s new since the Technical Preview rolled out over the summer.

The limited Technical Preview of Office 2010 went out to several thousand testers in the middle of July and now a public beta test programme has started with anyone able to download and try out Office 2010.

But six months ahead of its final release, what can we say about Office 2010 and will it be worth the cost of upgrading when it finally hits the shelves?

Building on the radical changes made with Office 2007, when Microsoft unveiled the “Fluent” user interface, Office 2010 presents the most unified face it has ever had. The ribbon is in every application and they all have a new Backstage area, which you use to open, save or print your documents or to set options about the applications. The roundly criticised “Office Button” which hid the file menu in Office 2007 has been replaced by a simple button labelled “File” leading to clear pages which lay out all the options you have for working with the document as a whole.

For this version of Office, Microsoft has obviously concentrated on improving usability and future-proofing the suite by adding features that you will really want to use, even if you don’t do so at the moment. It has also invested heavily in collaboration technologies particularly in the area of co-authoring documents and in integration with SharePoint.

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5 comments

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Social Networks and People profiles in Outlook today with Xobni

Hey Simon - we should let your users know that they can get LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more in Outlook today with Xobni - the free plugin for Outlook that has been downloaded 3 million times. free download: http://www.xobni.com Microsoft's social connect borrows many ideas from xobni, but we've been working with users on our product for 3 years and offer search and collaboration features far ahead of what one will find in Outlook. We'd love to have your readers give it a try. Matt Brezina Founder, Xobni

By mattbrezina on Wednesday Nov 18

No ribbons for me please!

I personally tend to favour SSuite Office’s free office suites. Their software also don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their software very small and efficient. http://www.ssuitesoft.com

By BeBob_Esq on Friday Nov 20

Open alternatives?

Because of the pain of sharing documents with older Word version users, my company has not upgraded since Office 2003. These days we increasingly use Google Docs for collaborative work, and Open Office for lightweight document preparation. And Thunderbird for email.

By Ip_kimf8d23f3453 on Friday Nov 20

RE:

@BeBob_Esq: I'm not sure why you continually tout this SSuite crap; perhaps you are associated with the product. I've just looked at their website and apart from it looking awful it is also full of inaccuracies. I'm being kind here -- "lies" would be more appropriate. For a start both RTF and XLS are Microsoft formats not "international document standards" which is the claim on the website. There is much to take issue with in the text that follows this, but it concludes with the line: "I have recently discovered that OpenOffice's Open Document format (*.odf) is just Rich Text dumped inside their own Open Document format wrapper. So do not get caught out with vendor lockin, not even from the open source community." This is complete tosh, ODF is an established ISO standard and is built on XML *not* RTF. Furthermore, whatever the pros and cons of open source software, vendor lockin is not one of the cons. Clearly, this can only happen when a licence to run proprietary software is bought from a vendor. To see these wild exaggerations for yourself check this out http://bit.ly/7ug9dH

By 6tricky9 on Tuesday Nov 24

With Lookeen perfect!

I really like the new Office 2010! Also my company is very satisfied with it! But we are still using the Outlook search tool Lookeen (http://www.lookeen)! This tool offers great GPOs and makes it possible to search public folder, what is very important for us!Beside this the search speed in unbreakable! So the new Office is great, but not perfect!

By Nashmas7 on Friday Oct 15