#179 Office 2010 arrives

Microsoft released to big businesses their 14th version of their Office suite last week. Consumers will get to see the product in June. This new version is creatively called Office 2010. It includes updates to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, OneNote and Sharepoint. It comes in 6 different groupings of these products and in 32bit and 64bit versions. Confusion on which box to buy will again be the entertainment of early summer. There will also be online versions of the software (note not with the SAME features) that you can access from any Internet access.

There are lots of changes and we will take a look at them in our June updates. One big change is that the file menus (File, Edit, View, Tools, Help) are back. For some inexplicable reason Microsoft got rid of the file menu in Office 2007. They put in the Office "Ribbon" that was supposed to be quicker to use then the menu system. Mass confusion took over the software world as no one could find any of the features they normally. It only took 3 years for Microsoft to admit they were wrong. Note that 70% of the Office users in the world still use Office 2003 mainly due to this mistake. Outlook didn't get the ribbon in 2007, but does in 2010. Thank goodness the menu items are still there.

So will this be a "good" upgrade? The pluses are that this version should be faster. It takes advantage of the new Intel multi core processors. The 64bit version will allow for absolutely HUGE Excel spreadsheets (did you ever ask for a bigger Excel?). Changes in Word are fairly minimal other then the interface. Cut/Copy/Paste get some extra options and you can do more editing of pictures you insert into your documents. The Office 2010 suite uses a still different file format. So when one of your buddies buys the new version, if they send you a Word or Excel file, you probably won't be able to open in until a conversion utility is released. Outlook and PowerPoint seem to get the most upgrades and mostly for the better.

PCSS will install Office 2010 on our Window 7 laptop so that customers can take a peek. We'll take it through all the paces and let you know our opinion on whether to upgrade or not.