In every sense of the word, Microsoft Office is huge. Hundreds of millions of people use at least one of the programs in the Office family every day—in enterprises, small and medium-size businesses, homes, and schools. When Microsoft released Office 2010 to manufacturing on April 15, it kicked off an upgrade cycle that will last for several years.
I’ve got a unique perspective on Office. I’ve written at least one book about every version of Office since 1994 (that’s eight releases and 10 books in 16 years, for those who are keeping score). I’ve also written countless magazine articles and blog posts, all of them based on extensive, hands-on experience with the individual Office products. This time around is no exception. I’ve spent the last six months immersed in Office 2010, using all the core programs day in and day out, digging in to see what’s new, what works, and what’s still annoying after all these years. In this post (first of a series), my goal is to give you a wide-ranging overview of what’s in Office 2010, so you can decide whether it matters to you.
Judging by the Talkback comments I’ve seen in various posts here and in quick-and-dirty reviews elsewhere, I know there’s a lot of misconception about what’s in Office 2010. I’ve read a few comments that dismissed the changes in this edition as superficial eye candy, hardly worth the upgrade. And I understand how easy it would be to come to that conclusion if you simply poke at Word and Outlook for a couple hours (or even a couple days), and then fire up the other Office apps for a quick lap around the track. With that sort of superficial look, it’s easy to pass judgment on Office as too big, too complicated, too expensive, too old. (Amusingly, most reviewers I’ve read find some pet feature that doesn’t work exactly as they would have designed it and then harp on that for the bulk of the review. It’s as predictable as the sunrise.)
Honestly, I wish Office 2010 was a minor upgrade. If it were, I would have been done with this book about six weeks ago and I’d be sitting on a tropical beach sipping mai tais right now. But the reality is different: Office 2010 is a surprisingly deep, thoughtfully designed, well-engineered collection of software programs. The more I dig, the more I like the small but useful touches that the Office design team has wrought. That’s not just my opinion, either. I’ve heard variations on that sentiment from dozens of correspondents, including a few who are Office skeptics.
It is true that the core programs in Office—Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint—are mature, as befits their age. There are only a handful of truly new features to be found, which I point out in the balance of this post. Much of the work in Office 2010 is cleanup and polishing, smoothing over rough edges, making common features work the same across apps, improving performance. In some striking ways, Office 2010 is to its predecessor as Windows 7 is to Windows Vista. And that’s not a bad thing.
Microsoft has made a substantial investment in online features for this edition. With Office Web Apps, it’s delivered a version 1.0 release of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, with a common feature set that works on Windows Live SkyDrive for consumers (or will, in a few months when the retail version is released) and as part of SharePoint servers in big corporations. It’s not a competitor to Google Docs—and it might never be, because Microsoft is still in the business of selling shrink-wrapped software. But Office Web Apps offer a decent feature set and fairly significant promise. I’ll look at those web-based pieces in a follow-up post. Today I’m focusing exclusively on the desktop version of Office.
If you were hoping to see a simpler lineup of Office editions in 2010 than in its predecessors, I have only a little good news. The lineup is more logical and consistent, but the number of available combinations is still confusing, and the licensing story has, sadly, become more complex than ever. If you have questions about the details of what’s in each edition, what they’ll cost, and when they’ll be available for sale, see the last page in this package, Prices, packaging, dates, and other details.
As part of my research for this post, I fired up copies of Office 2003 and Office 2007 in virtual machines and used them alongside the new edition for a few days. If you’ve already deployed Office 2007, at least some of these features will be old news. But for anyone who has stuck with Office 2003 for all these years and still uses it heavily, the cumulative changes are overwhelmingly positive, and it’s hard to imagine an objective reason for not upgrading.
Here’s what I cover in this post:
Page 2: The Ribbon, finished Every program now has been ribbonized, including Outlook, OneNote, and Publisher. But that’s not the only interesting UI change.
Page 3: What’s new in Word, Excel, and Outlook? These are the programs everyone uses, in the office and at home. Are there any new killer features?
Page 4: Prices, packaging, dates, and other details You’ve got questions, I’ve got the answers you’re looking for.
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