Posts Tagged ‘Office 2010’

Office 2010 is here

Friday, May 14th, 2010

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
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.

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Office 2010 is on the way

Friday, March 19th, 2010

So what? you might ask, it’ll only be a revamp of the older office 2007!

Well having had a look at it I can only say that I was impressed! There has obviously been a lot of thought put in to how to improve the user experience, and enable the average user to be able to perform tasks that would previously had to be put out to a specialist.

The ribbon is still there, I know that a lot of people don’t like it but once you get the hang of it it does make sense, with functions being grouped and displayed according to what you are doing, and you can customize the ribbon if you want to. The simple fact is that if you tried to get all the functionality in to the old toolbar system the screen would be full of buttons without any workspace so I guess that it will be here to stay for the foreseeable future. They have conceeded the fact that the pearl in the top left was not very intuitive and this has been replaced with a file button that doesn’t look as nice but at least you know it’s there!

Some of the improvements will appeal to some more than others but some of the things that appealed to me were:

  • The improvements in the way that email can be managed in Outlook, with the ability to compress long email threads in to conversations, choose to ignore future emails on the same thread (i.e. automatically delete it) the ability to add rules to emails, when used with exchange, that prevent confidential emails being forwarded, copied, printed or sent out of the building.
  • The fact that when keeping notes in Onenote it now tracks what you were looking at at the time and inserts a link allowing you to keep the context of your thoughts.
  • The ease with which you can edit picures and video within the document that is being worked on instead of having to use a picture or video editing package.
  • If you work on documents in collaboration with others then there have been further improvements to allow simultaneous working, with only the paragraph being edited being locked for editing rather than the whole document meaning that you can have two people editing a document at one time if you need to.
  • I can see that the presence facility in Outlook/Exchange would be good for some people, the fact that you get details of if someone is in or not when typing a name in the address bar could be useful in a larger organization.
  • The massive improvement in Powerpoint, which frankly has to be seen to believed. click here to have a look
  • Office is available for use on a larger number of devices such as smart phones and even offers web based and subscription options.

 With office 2010 starting to ship from May through July depending which version you buy but to make sure that people purchasing and activating Office 2007 either under OEM or FPP before then they will be entitled to a free upgrade to Office 2010 available to download up until the end of September.

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