Like Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010 has been available in beta so long and so publicly (and has run so reliably) that the actual launch might almost seem an anti-climax.
Around 7.5 million people have downloaded various versions of it, and the Office team has had 650,000 individual feedback reports - and those have changed things, particularly in Outlook and OneNote.
Office 2010's UK release date is 12 May (although large businesses and developers can get Office Standard and Professional Plus 2010 already) and three versions, Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, and Office Professional 2010, will be in the shops in June.
- Home and Student: £109.99
- Home and Business: £199.99
- Professional: £429.99
That's also when the free Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote web apps will be available on Windows Live.
They have fewer features than the desktop apps, but they mean you can view and edit Office documents on any machine, you can use them to co-author documents online, and you can keep a OneNote notebook online and work on it in the desktop OneNote app at the same time as a friend or colleague.
RIBBON: All the Office apps now have the ribbon interface and an updated version of the Office menu (called Backstage, but opened from a tab marked File because that's what people look for)
The Home and Student version of Office includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote; Home and Business adds Outlook. Professional, which we review here, gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher.
Whichever version of Office you get, you're getting something you didn't get before: OneNote and the web apps in all the versions, Publisher in the Professional version.
RIBBON: Create your own tabs on the ribbon, add tools and pick an icon to use for the dropdown if there isn't enough space to show all the icons individually
There's also a cheaper academic version of Office Professional, but the best way for most people to save money is to get the Home and Student version - or instead of paying for the box and the media, buy a product keycard with the licence number to unlock a pre-installed copy of Office Starter on a new PC.
Office Starter is the basic version of Word and Excel that ships on new PCs. It doesn't have the References, Review and View tabs on the ribbon, it lets you edit tables of contents and smart art that's already in a document but it doesn't let you create them from scratch and you can't create pivot tables in Excel. It does have task panes - and it always has a little ad for Office in the corner.
BACKSTAGE: The Backstage menu is one place for all the things you might want to do with your document, explained in handy detail
It's very much a replacement for Works - or for WordPad - and if you want the full new feature set of Office 2010 then you want one of the full versions.
The question is, with free apps like OpenOffice, free online apps like Google Docs - and the free Office web apps themselves - what do you get from Office 2010, and do you want it?
Your comments (18) Click to add a new comment
jng
January 26th
18. This must be the stupidist product ever inflicted on mankind. I get nothing new of value and I waste hours learning a new interface with no easy way of using the interface that worked fine for me. Microsoft this is the reason that you will not survive.
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baz
September 27th 2010
17. Bradavon, thank you for the suggestion, but I DID try help, and I can assure you that on my version, there was no mention of zero values, hidden or gold plated.
On Office 2000 Pro,I do not recall reams of endless menus - a few sub menus that I had no need for, admittedly. But, for me to keep something for ten years has to say something about the product. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
In it's favour, I must say that when I want to write, edit and spell check in UK English, 2010 does remember - rather than returning to it's roots at every verse end.
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bradavon
September 24th 2010
16. You need to get used to the ribbon Baz because I can assure you it's much simpler than the reams of endless menus Office 2003 and prior gave us.
The options tend to just be there, instead of hidden in a very long menu. Sure you need to learn where some of the options are now but that's what help is for.
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baz
September 23rd 2010
15. Maybe I'm still in the last century but I have been happily using Office 2000 Professional for many years. Why? - because it does everything that I want it to do but it does it instantly. So does Works 4.5 - yes it's over ten years old but it works fast and easily. When I bought myself a new PC, four weeks back, I was advised to buy Office 2010 and Kaspersky 2011, which I did. What a culture shock. I find that Office now runs on only one cylinder, taking over half a minute to load. I find it to be grossly over com-plicated, brimming with features that I will never, ever need - will you ever need them, I ask. Let's take an example - hiding zero values. With the old systems it was just a couple of clicks and bingo, job done. With 2010 I cannot even find out if that facility exists. Perhaps some kind soul will offer guidance in that respect. The MS help site was anything but and wants to charge me £46 because it cannot recognise its own Product Key - correctly typed in, I assure you.
When will Microsoft learn that simplicity is needed not complexity.
Baz
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jam
August 14th 2010
14. ribbon is useless, if you change the parameters and look, then go to another machine all is lost. as described by others outlook is poor. I'm ditching it for Openoffice, it works and is good enough for the avarage punter. Anyone ever tried office 6 on a new machine, it really flies??
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katelowe
July 26th 2010
13. Microsoft Office 2010 offers some brilliant updated and upgraded features to. Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 in particular has been greatly enhanced, offering features such as co-authoring, embedding videos, the option to link PowerPoint presentations to the web as well as improved picture editing tools. A great improvement.
Kate, www.article10.com
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georgetracey
May 27th 2010
12. Word 2010 'features'
Printer driver connection is inadequate - does not show flexibility of my printer
Does not show section number beside page number on bottom of screen
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pauljdavies
May 20th 2010
11. DON'T install Office 2010 yet. I installed the release to manufacturing Office 2010 and had to remove it and return to Office 2007. Outlook 2010 has been released with serious bugs in its ability to send mail. (Call me picky, but I want two things always to work in a mail programme - send and receive.) Check the web and you will see that sending has been a serious problem since early betas. Now Microsoft has released a mail programme that doesn't send. You can force it to by quitting the programme (and killing it as a process as it doesn't exit properly) and then reloading. It then sends the mail you have accumulated but won't send any more until you repeat the process. I did a system restore and Outlook 2007, using the same settings, worked perfectly. By the way, I did try all the work arounds on the web - still didn't work.
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marybranscombe
May 11th 2010
10. @awjr - bradavon specifically asked about Facebook integration; the business features in Outlook are mail rules that work with Exchange, getting voice mail recognised and sent to you as email, conversation view, Quick Steps, fast search - and lots more, as covered in the review ;-) Outlook gets the most new individual features, followed by PowerPoint but as noted nearly all the apps get a range of new tools for working with images and all the apps have significant updates. I can see some businesses wanting to upgrade just for the security sandboxing, actually...
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bradavon
May 7th 2010
9. Students get such an enormous discount! -
Office 2010 Pro Plus: £47.34
Windows 7 Ultimate x64: £57.99
All "Home" users should be eligible! I wonder if Office is x86, x64 or both?
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beyondcontent
May 6th 2010
8. Students can buy the official Office 2010 download now from Software4Students.co.uk
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bradavon
May 6th 2010
7. I was hoping they'd finally added Tab support. It works so well in browsers, why not here?
You can download OfficeTab though.
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msd
May 6th 2010
6. I really cannot believe that MS have still not sorted out Excel having multiple windows! :(
One of my biggest bug bear with Office is that for all its good points it is drastically inconsistent between the individual products. Take tables as an example I often copy between Word/Excel and PowerPoint and its infuriating that features I can do in Word I can't do in PowerPoint or Excel or vice versa. Pretty sure there won't be a migration from Office 2007 to 2010 - we're only just completing migrating onto 2007. Here's hoping for Office 2013! ;) Still bet Excel will be single doc mode...
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awjr
May 5th 2010
5. So we saying it's Outlook that's great here and the reason it's great is that it integrates into a social network site?
How do you exactly plan to sell that feature to a business. "Hey this can make your staff even more unproductive. You should upgrade!"
From a business perspective, if you use 2007, is this worth upgrading to?
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marybranscombe
May 5th 2010
4. @awjr - I've been using it as my main Office since beta, I hated going back to Office 2007 so instant upgrade.
@bradavon - alas, messages with no subject get lumped into one conversation. I keep asking the Outlook team for a manual splitting tool for that, but I think conversation view still hugely useful.
I already access my Facebook inbox from Outlook by telling Facebook to send it all to me (with a rule to put it in a folder); OCS gives you Facebook updates for people in email without you having to visit the site at all ;-)
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bradavon
May 5th 2010
3. I'm really looking forward to Facebook integration. That will be so handy. Particularly if you can access your Facebook Inbox directly from Outlook!
Outlook has had a Conversation view for some time but it's not the default option and doesn't work very well. Hopefully it's improved here.
" or you get or send a lot of messages with the same subject, emails are likely to get mis-threaded."
How does this work for messages without a subject? Outlook puts RE: or FW: in the subject. Currently these all get bunched together. Which just results in a mess.
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bradavon
May 5th 2010
2. OpenOffice, Google Docs and the Office Web Apps don't have Outlook and there is nothing else on the market like it. Older versions of Outlook work just fine but if you want the latest technology, you'll need Outlook 2010!
If you however only need basic e-mail, Windows Live Mail will do just fine. It also syncs your Hotmail Calendar + Contacts to Hotmail.com.
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awjr
May 5th 2010
1. But would you upgrade?
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