Microsoft Office 2010
The latest version of Microsoft Office suite goes on sale in June, with the aptly named title of Microsoft Office 2010.
Microsoft Office 2010 includes slimmed-down versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote – under the term Office Web Apps. The Office Web Apps is a good new feature and allows users to view, edit and share documents online.
Microsoft has also priced Office 2010 aggressively – you can download the basic Home and Student version, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, for $149 (£110 in the UK), or buy it loaded on a new PC for as little as $119 (£90).
There is just one big interface change in the latest version: the inclusion of the ribbon on Outlook, Microsoft’s e-mail, contact management and calendar desktop app, making it feel much more integrated into the Office suite. Office 2010 users can now customise the menu ribbon in all the desktop apps to assemble the commands they use most often – which should help satisfy critics who felt the ribbon lacked the simplicity of the old Office menu bar.
Overall, Office 2010 will feel familiar to anyone who uses Office 2007, and the version of the software available on Tuesday is very similar to the beta version, which was Microsoft’s most extensive software trial to date. More than 5.5m users downloaded the beta code, which expires in October.
I like the new feature, the Backstage view, which includes several new options for creating, printing, saving and sharing a document as well as information about recent versions of the document and the “permissions” (who can do what) associated with it .
Outlook that has undergone the most dramatic – and long overdue – changes.
Some, such as the option to view all messages in an e-mail thread, rather than in purely chronological order, match those already available in Google’s Gmail. Others make it easier to manage, delete and organise messages (including deleting a whole e-mail thread), add new e-mail accounts and configure automatic “Out of Office” replies.
Overall, these changes transform Outlook from an ageing desktop e-mail app into a modern communications-management tool that can compete with the best of the rest, including applications such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Gmail.
