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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.

Editions

There will be six different editions of Office 2010. The free Starter Edition – consisting of ad-supported, cut-down versions of Word and Excel – is designed to be given away with new PCs. There will still be the -£99 Home & Student Edition which gives you three licences for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for non-commercial use within a family.

The remaining four versions are suitable for business use. A new Home and Business Edition has the five major applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook and sits below Standard edition which also contains Publisher. It appears that Standard Edition will only be available through volume licencing. The Professional Edition, which will be available through Retail or Volume Licencing, contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher and Access. Professional Plus Edition consists of InfoPath, Communicator and SharePoint Workspace and again this edition is only available to volume licencing customers.

Price chart

No pricing details are available as yet though historically prices have not changed much from one version to the next. Upgrades from previous versions to Office 2007 Professional currently retail for about £188 a seat and to Standard Edition for about £146 so you can expect to pay similar prices for upgrades to Office 2010. Volume licencing customers with Software Assurance agreements will, of course, get the upgrade as part of their deal.

Click here for our review of Windows 7.

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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