The last time I wrote on the subject I had seen a demonstration of the new Office 2010 at a Microsoft event, and whilst the Beta version was available I decided to wait until the release version was available before trying it myself. I installed it yesterday on my old laptop running XP and it went on great and so far I am still impressed. I had thought that it might slow the system down but it is fine, just as fast as it was before so far.
The number of available editions available has been simplified, rather than the host of options that were available in the previous versions there are now fewer options that seem to make sense. There are the Home and Student, Office Home and Business and Professional versions available as FPP (Full Packaged Products) see below for details:
- Office 2010 Comparison Chart
I am not sure why but the 2010 will not be available under the Open Licence Plan until July, and unlike the OEM or FPP packages, where if you bought the 2007 version and registered it, you could download the upgrade free, under licencing you will not be able to upgrade unless you also buy the software assurance, I guess that anyone looking to purchase Office under licencing should hold on until July to make sure that they can get the latest version.
Once you open up the programs the first thing that you notice is that the ribbon is still there, of course it is, did you think that MS would give up on that idea? I know that a lot of people hate the ribbon, and it does takes some getting used to but once you start to get the hang of it you can find your way round quite quickly and now that it has been incorporated in to the whole suite I guess that people will get used to it even more.
I do like the return of the file button, nice and obvious and easy to see (they have made it a nice bright colour too, I wonder if they did that sarcastically because people couldn’t find the “pearl”?), and the enhanced printer selections and print previews are great too. It looks as though the filtering and search options in Outlook are going to be really useful, I particularly like the clean up option that allows you to tidy up those long conversation emails, you know the ones, where there are 100’s of emails all relating to one subject with all the messages and replies incrementing one at a time and getting longer and longer just filling up the mailbox, with this button you can clear out all the old messages and just keep the most recent one. The other thing that I will have to experiment with are the one click rules that you can set up (within the ribbon) that allow you to forward mails on or move them to a folder with one click.
Any way so far so good, I will let you know if I change my mind and go back to the earlier version but so far I doubt that I will.
Tags: Office, Office 2010