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Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview: Hands-on Review

Will Kelly — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:00:18 +0000

Recently, I got access to the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview. I spent some quality time over the past week going through the latest version of the suite and delving into all of its new features. In this post, I am going to concentrate on the productivity-boosting enhancements available in the new version. Microsoft says that it has put a lot of effort into productivity and making the product easier to use, but has that work paid off?

Backstage View

Office 2010 replaces the old File menu in all of the applications with something called “Backstage View.” This contains familiar tasks like Save, Print and Publish. However, it also makes a lot of document-specific information including Document Mode, Permissions, Prepare for Distribution, and Versions readily available.

Backstage View didn’t stand out to me when I was looking over the list of new features. However, I was quickly sold on it while testing Word 2010, because it put all of my important document management information into a single view.

Ribbon Menu Enhancements

While Office 2010 keeps the ribbon menu that was introduced in Office 2007, it now extends across the entire Microsoft Office 2010 suite. While the ribbon has just as many detractors as it does lovers, Microsoft has made many improvements over the version found in Office 2007. In particular, it lets you customize it to your particular working style in each application. The ribbon received a lot of criticism in the 2007 release, but these enhancements should build greater acceptance of perhaps the most drastic Office interface change so far.

Support for Co-authoring

Word 2010, OneNote 2010, and PowerPoint 2010 now include a co-authoring feature, enabling multiple authors to work on the same document at the same time. This is a welcome change from having to use SharePoint, where only one author at a time can check a document out for editing. The addition of co-authoring is really ratcheting Office 2010’s collaboration options.

Improved Conversation View in Outlook 2010

Email management can be a challenge to even the most experienced web worker. To help tame your inbox, Outlook 2010 includes an improved Conversation View, which includes:

Show Messages from All Folders
Reverse Sort
Add Columns
Expand/Collapse

I am pleased with the new, more granular Conversation View. The controls are very accessible and usable, showing a definite improvement over Outlook 2007.

OneNote 2010

While it has been part of the Office family since 2003, OneNote 2010 is now included as part of every Office 2010 edition. This is a well-deserved “bump up” for OneNote, and I hope to that it takes the application further into the corporate mainstream now that it isn’t a separate purchase. The latest release of the popular note-taking app sports version tracking, highlighting and Linked Notes.

As a longtime OneNote user, these features are very handy. I can’t wait until OneNote is available on the web so that I can see how it stacks up against EverNote.

Final Thoughts about Office 2010 Technical Preview

My tests of Microsoft Office 2010 show enough productivity tweaks to make it an attractive upgrade. If the upcoming Office Web components live up to their potential, then Office 2010 is going to break from the tradition of Office releases having to compete against previous versions of itself and make a strong first impression on the web office suite market.

Have you tried Office 2010 Technical Preview?

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Microsoft Office Web: Good for Its Competitors?

Simon Mackie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:00:51 +0000

The much-anticipated online version of Microsoft Office will roll out into Technical Preview later this summer. While Microsoft has announced that it will be free to everyone with a Windows Live account (and thus free to anyone), it looks like the free version will not have the full feature set. In a detailed post over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Tom Reestman explains that this is a case of Microsoft tripping over itself by wanting the best of both worlds — to offer a free, web-based solution for consumers that leverages the Office brand to compete with Google Apps and Zoho, while at the same time telling businesses that it’s really just a supplement to the “real” Office on the desktop, and that it will require licensing and server costs in order to get the full package.

Microsoft has a great brand in Office, a huge user base and an opportunity to come up with an online product that blows its online competitors out of the water — unfortunately, as it’s still heavily reliant on revenues from the desktop version of the suite, it looks like the web app will be compromised, which is good news for both Google and Zoho.

Are you looking forward to Office Web?

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Office 2010 Includes Office Web, But Not Available Until Next Year

Simon Mackie — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:25:28 +0000

Microsoft said today that the Technical Preview of Office 2010 will start to be be rolled out to beta testers, and confirmed speculation from last week that Office 2010 will include Office Web, lightweight web app versions of Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. Office Web will be available for free to anyone with a Microsoft Live account.

This is especially good news for web workers who have been longing for an access-anywhere version of the Office suite, many of whom have been struggling with hybrid Office/Google Docs solutions.

However, the bad news is that Office 2010 and Office Web won’t be available until the first half of next year, so unless you have access to the Technical Preview you’re going to have to wait a long time to try it out. Microsoft has hinted that a wider beta test of Office Web could be made available later this year, but that still seems like a painfully long wait in today’s “release early, iterate often” world of web apps. In the meantime, I think it’s quite likely that we’ll see some considerable improvements to Google Apps.

What do you think of this announcement? Can you wait until early next year for Office Web?

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