For those who don’t know, Microsoft Office 2010 went RTM (which stands for “Released to Manufacturing” and means that the software has come out of testing and is finalised).
So what’s new in this release?
Office 2010 sees the new ribbon interface deployed to all of the applications in the suite. If you happened to use Office 2007, you may have noticed that this new interface was limited to Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Certainly, the change to the interface was probably the most disruptive but innovative change to Microsoft Office since its inception. Personally, I love the ribbon as it exposes often hidden functionality of the Office applications whilst the tabbed categories and large buttons go some way to improve the look and feel in addition to usability on higher resolution screens.
Microsoft Office Access 2010
Microsoft Office Excel 2010
Microsoft Office OneNote 2010
Microsoft Office Outlook 2010
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010
Microsoft Office Publisher 2010
Microsoft Office Word 2010
One other “feature” (for want of a better term) is that Microsoft Office 2010 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. I’m yet to discover any benefits of running the 64-bit version under a 64-bit version of Windows apart from performance gains and the removal of the 2GB application memory limit. One drawback that I have discovered is that Microsoft Access will refuse to open 32-bit MDE (an executable Microsoft Access database stripped of editable source code). For most people who won’t use Microsoft Access, this won’t be an issue but could present a problem for small businesses using their own custom databases.
I’ve used the Office 2010 Beta for a number of months now and, as boring as it might sound, I have had no issues with it at all. I’ve just uninstalled the Beta release and installed the RTM release for the purpose of taking the screenshots. So far, so good.
So if you have Office 2007 then you might not be compelled to shell out for another upgrade but if you had Office 2003 or earlier it would definitely be worthwhile (as long as you have a decent computer). You might be able to get it cheaper than retail if you read an earlier blog entry, “Find Software on the Cheap“. Nonetheless, it makes me feel like my work laptop is somewhat dated even though I have Office 2007 on it.
Beware, as an early adopter you might end up teaching others how to use the software (especially those coming from older versions of Microsoft Office)!
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