Microsoft Office 2010 is a
worthy upgrade for businesses and individual users who need professional-level
productivity apps, but it will take some time to get acclimated with the
reworked interface. Users looking for bare-bones, dead-simple office software
should stick with Google's and other online offerings or continue using older
Office versions they have already mastered.
The world has changed plenty since Microsoft introduced
Office 2007. In that time, Google has become a major player, with its suite of
online tools, and even Apple has made inroads with its iWork office suite, though
admittedly within a smaller set of computer users. Even with the vast user base
of Microsoft Office products, with new competitors in the market, Microsoft
Office 2010 needed to be good. Playing catch-up and looking forward
simultaneously, Microsoft tries, in Office 2010, to remain (or become) the
central hub of your working life, letting you use your PC, smartphone, and the
Web to make your projects come together more efficiently.
It's true: every application in the suite has been improved
and tweaked in an effort to make your busy days more efficient, but you'll need
to be ready for a learning curve to get accustomed to Office 2010's changes.
This update isn't for everyone; if you're a power user who
has a specific way you like to do things and want all the same functionality as
an older version of Microsoft Office, then you can probably get by on an older
version. Just like with Office 2007, however, Office 2003 or earlier versions
of the suite will need conversion tools to open many of the now default Open
XML file types. But if you are eager to try out new time-saving features and
are willing to spend some time learning where everything is, we think you will
appreciate this major update. Even new users of productivity suites and
students looking for a solid set of productivity apps will benefit from the new
features in Office 2010--and surely the Academic license is more than
reasonable for what you get.
One of the major new changes to the suite is the ability to
collaborate and share your work using Web apps. You can collaborate using Web
apps over your SkyDrive (25GB of available online storage) on Windows Live. You
may also be able to collaborate with a coworker using a slimmed down Facebook-connected
version of the Web apps, however, Microsoft representatives explained to us
that the Facebook-connected version we saw in the company demo is only a pilot
program to test social media features. As is, having two ways to connect seems
a bit confusing to us, but we'll reserve judgment until the bugs are ironed out.
Office editions:
We reviewed Office 2010 Professional, which costs a
substantial $499. This suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook,
Publisher, and Access, in addition to SharePoint Workspace for collaborative
tools, and InfoPath Designer for standardized forms. If you don't need desktop
e-mail, you should opt for the lowest tier Office, Home & Student at $149, which
includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Office 2010 Home and Business
adds Outlook 2010 to the Home and Student version and costs $279. Office
Professional Academic 2010 is available through authorized academic resellers
only and costs $99. Unfortunately, there is no upgrade pricing for Microsoft
Office 2010, because Microsoft found that most people buy Office when they buy
a new computer and there was little interest in upgrades at retail outlets.
Interface:
The Ribbon has returned in Office 2010 (first introduced in
Office 2007) and now is offered in all the applications in suite. There was
plenty of resistance among users to the introduction of the Ribbon in Office 2007
across only a few core applications, and now you will be faced with these
changes across all the apps. We can only suggest to those that are still
resistant to the Ribbon that, with time, the cross-application functionality
becomes very useful. The Ribbon now changes based on what feature you're using
at the time and you have the ability to add or remove features to any Ribbon if
you need certain features for your specific workflow. Just like in Office 2007,
there's a core set of always-on tabs in the Ribbon, as well as contextual tabs
that appear only when the software detects that you need them. Picture
formatting tools, for example, show up as a tab only if you select an image in
your document.
One of the more jarring changes is the file menu that will
now take you to a full-page document management section called Backstage. Like
the old file menu (or logo menu) you'll be able to open, save, and print your
documents from Backstage, but now Microsoft has added a slew of features to
help you with the next steps for your document. You can set permissions to lock
down your changes--including password-protected document encryption--create
access restrictions for specific users, and include an invisible digital
signature to ensure the integrity of the document.
Save and send features (sharing) are also found in Backstage,
along with the option to inspect the document for hidden data (like document
comments and revisions), Check Accessibility for those with disabilities, and
also to ensure compatibility across older versions of Office. Once you've
properly inspected your document, you can click the Save and Send button to
open up options for auto-attaching the document to an e-mail, saving to the Web
(with a Windows Live account) for collaboration or accessibility from anywhere,
saving to SharePoint for interoffice availability, and other options. Your
print preview options are also now in Backstage, so you can see how your
document will look without opening extra windows. Though useful, the reworked
File menu (or Backstage window) may be one of the interface tweaks people have
a hard time getting used to, but we think having all these features in one
place is much more efficient.
Like Office 2007, Office 2010 lets you quickly change styles,
colors, and fonts in most applications of the suite through the use of pull-down
Style Galleries. In PowerPoint, for example, along with helpful image-editing
tools (more on that later), you can quickly preview how effects will change
your image simply by mousing over each effect. Similarly, as you mouse over
different fonts in Word, the document will change in real time before you
commit.
Office 2010 makes this "view before you commit" functionality
available in more than just stylistic changes to your document. Some of our
favorite new interface features are the paste-preview tools that let you see
what pasted content will look like before you commit to adding it to your
document. In Word 2010, for example, once you've copied information elsewhere, you
can quickly mouse over the paste preview tools to see how content will appear
using formatting from the source, merged formatting, or how it will look with
the source formatting stripped out.
Features:
Alongside interface enhancements like the Ribbon across all
Office 2010 applications, Microsoft Office 2010 offers a number of features
that should reduce the time you spend gathering information so you can spend
more time on solid presentation. Simple image and video editing tools are
welcome additions to anyone who works with media in their documents and
presentations. Many of the new features push your presentations away from the
usual bullet points and toward more-engaging visual effects.
PowerPoint now provides options for editing video right
within the program. You can trim video so your audience sees only the video
content you want them to see. You also can add video effects, fades, and even
create video triggers to launch animations during your presentation. These
video bookmarks can be used to cue captions at specific points during a video, for
example. When it's a static presentation you're working on--such as a
publication, newsletter, or pamphlet--Office 2010 lets you color-correct and
add artistic effects and borders to images so you won't need a third-party
image editor. We found many of these features to be quite intuitive once we
were able to track them down in their appropriate Ribbon tabs. Like many
features in Office 2010, it's not the functionality that can be challenging, but
rather the getting used to the feature that is.
Outlook has seen many notable feature improvements in Office
2010, which will save users time in their daily e-mail tasks if they get past
the initial learning curve. The new Conversation View lets you group threads
together so you can view an entire conversation in one place. With plenty of
competition in Google's online Gmail search tools, Outlook 2010 needed to make
attractive new features to continue to be competitive, and this feature makes
searching through e-mail much easier. You also can run Clean Up to strip out
redundant messages and threads so you have just the info you need without
scanning through several e-mails. Microsoft got mixed reviews during beta
testing of this feature, but we think that this might be one of those features (like
the Ribbon) that will become more useful as users become acclimated with a new
way of doing things. A new feature called Quicksteps lets you create macros for
common daily tasks like regular forwarding of specific e-mails to third parties.
Say you have sales e-mails from several parties that are sent to you on a
regular basis, but need to go to another person within your company. With
Quicksteps you could custom create a macro that would automatically send that e-mail
on with the click of a button. Like the Conversation View features, Quicksteps
is not immediately intuitive, but after some study, it will save you an
enormous amount of time processing e-mails in the future. Even with the tweaks
for simplifying your e-mail processing, Outlook still seems more in tune with
large business clients than with smaller companies that could probably get by
with online alternatives.
New coauthoring in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, as well as
advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook, make
collaboration much easier, reducing the time it takes to finish large projects
with several contributors. Businesses are required to use Microsoft SharePoint
Server 2010 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to collaborate on projects,
but private users can access their work using Windows Live and Web apps on
SkyDrive. Word and PowerPoint now have a syncing mechanism to avoid sudden
changes while you're working on a project (a major concern in the beta). We
wonder how people will react to this specific change, since now the only way to
have live coauthoring (without the need to sync up changes) will be through
OneNote. In any case, offering access to shared documents in key business
applications from anywhere is something any international business or business
traveler can appreciate. Google Docs, though not as elegant, are extremely easy
to share with other users, so offering OneNote as the only option may not be
enough.
Live edits in OneNote are only one of the new features for
Microsoft's notebook-like application, however. Sketching out ideas, collaborating
in real time, and adding images, video, audio, and text are all available in
OneNote as it sits to the side of what you're working on. This enables you to
drop sections of text, images, and other tidbits into OneNote's interface to
keep all your ideas in one place. An upgraded Navigation Bar makes it easy to
jump between notebooks to copy or merge information. When you're collaborating
on a project, OneNote now features automatic highlighting so you can quickly
find changes to your notebook since your last save. Features like these, along
with new visual styles and a Web version with live changes, make OneNote the
key collaborative tool of the suite. Our only question is whether people will
accept OneNote as their mainstay for live collaboration since it has less name
recognition than bigger apps in the suite.
In addition to upgraded collaboration tools, you'll now be able
to work on your documents anywhere with slimmed down Web-based versions of Word,
PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. The Web based components will make sharing
information easier whether it's from your home computer, your phone, or when
you're traveling for business. The Web apps preserve the look and feel of a
document regardless of the device you're working on--even if it's your
smartphone. These apps seem to work as advertised mostly, but we wonder how
well the Web-based versions will work when server loads reach into the several
millions of users. What sets these apps apart from Google Docs and other
services is that your documents and spreadsheets retain their formatting, giving
Office 2010's Web apps a leg up against its online counterparts.
Excel has received some tweaks as well, with easier-to-read,
color-coded spreadsheets and smart tools to bring in the information you need. In
Excel 2010, you can flip through the tabs to access formulas, insert diagrams
and charts, and quickly import data from connected sources. A new feature
called Sparklines lets you create a small chart in a single cell. This lets
users compare data across multiple cells with added graphical elements to make
them easier to read and spot trends over time. These moves seem to suggest that
Microsoft is trying to make spreadsheets a little more accessible to a wider
swath of users. We welcome the new customization features, especially as Excel
retains the powerful tools users have come to expect.
Those who are involved in creating their own publications
and newsletters will appreciate new changes to Publisher 2010. With several
available templates, you can add your personal business logo graphics and
branding and then preview them in real time across each template style. Microsoft
has added ligatures and Stylistic Alternates to fonts so you can add your own
personal touches to your publications. Like the other applications we've talked
about in Office 2010, Publisher offers the same new useful image-editing tools,
so effects, color-correction, cropping, and more are only a few clicks away.
Hotmail integration
Late to our labs (and late to the game, some might say, with
Google and Yahoo leading the pack) are some of the new features that Windows
Live Hotmail will support when it launches to all users in July or August. Microsoft
says users will be offered the option to upload Office documents or images to
their SkyDrives, and then send a link of their work to a friend who uses
Hotmail. This will eliminate the need to use caution when sharing large files
for presentations, videos, or large collections of photos, because the
documents will exist in the cloud. The recipient will be able to view documents
in their original format and large multimedia files in their Inbox without the
need to wait for a huge download. This gives Hotmail users the opportunity to
pick and choose which content they want to download from SkyDrive.
As a result of new feature additions to Hotmail, images and
video will receive new options, too, including the ability to automatically
view a collection of images in a slideshow, and the ability to view photos and
video from third-party services like FlickR, SmugMug, Hulu, and YouTube, all
without having to leave Hotmail. Microsoft also says it will push Windows live
e-mail, calendar, and contact information, and more to your Windows Mobile
phone using Exchange ActiveSync.
Other new features we saw in the demo included separate
sections for viewing shipping information and e-mails from social Web sites, which
represent a significant amount of all e-mail messages.
Conclusion
Does Office 2010 offer enough to make it worth the upgrade
from earlier versions? We think that largely depends on how you use Microsoft
Office. New templates and quick access to video and image-editing tools are
welcome additions for those who create visual presentations of their content. Serious
spreadsheet power users will like the new features that tie data together in
Excel while making complex data more accessible in the Ribbon and more exciting
visually. Outlook's new conversation-scrubbing features and Quicksteps for
common e-mail actions could save daily e-mail users a lot of time, if they're
willing to learn the ropes initially. If you feel like Office 2003 or Office 2007
have all the features you need in your line of work, then there's probably
little reason to upgrade.
Obviously, the Ribbon is now the preferred method across the
entire suite for getting to features quickly. If you didn't like the Ribbon in
Office 2007, you probably won't like it now, but we think there's plenty of
utility in having a common interface tool across all the apps; it might be
worth learning a new way of doing things if you want to streamline your work
flow.
The new Hotmail integration features that will launch
alongside Office 2010 may give Google Docs a run for its money if they work as
advertised. We're impressed with what we've seen so far, but we'll need to
reserve judgment until users are relying on the new features en masse.
Office 2010 is a worthy upgrade for those who desire new
templates and visual styles, better ways of editing multimedia content in
publications and presentations, and easier methods of collaboration. The
ability to work from anywhere with the new Web apps is surely a big reason to
upgrade if your job requires that kind of flexibility.
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