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Microsoft Office 2010 beta review

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A lot of new and improved functionality has been squeezed in to Office 2010 above the obvious extension of the ribbon UI to those applications which missed out in 2007. The beta release is proving very stable so far but the usual caveats about beta software apply. (It hasn’t been fully tested and if something can go wrong it probably will when it is most inconvenient.)

Overall, this version of Office shows a lot of promise and appears to have something for everyone, particularly if you combine Office 2010 with the huge developments that have been made in SharePoint, even the free SharePoint Foundation 2010. Most of the improvements have been to elements common to all applications, making the applications work seamlessly together and increasing usability and the opportunities for collaboration.

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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