Anyone who knows me decently well, knows my hatred for all things MS on one hand, and the extreme love for MS Office on the other. I think that Office is one of the most useful piece of software ever written.
Anyway, the generous folks at MS were good enough to give me a copy of the Technical Preview of Office 2010 sometime back. I started using it almost ten days back, and so far I have been pretty pleased. I was never a huge fan of Office 2007, as I was never comfortable with the ribbon. However, Office 2007 is the standard install at ISB, and having gotten used to the ribbon over the last three months, it was not too difficult to transition to Office 2010. I did not install the newer version of Outlook, and from what I have read, it seems to be a major improvement. So this is in no way a complete review.
Most of Office 2010 is pretty similar to the previous version, but there are a few enhancements that I particularly like.
- Excel Sparklines – create good looking graphs in cells easily. Minimal formatting, but immensely useful for dashboard kind of stuff.
- Insert Screenshot – immensely useful! How many times did we have to do Print Scrn to paste pics from other widows. Kiss goodbye to such troubles. The new office suite gives immense control on the kind of screen shots you can include.
- Advanced Picture Tools – from a damn cool background removal tool, to advanced Photoshop like features, this is a a major improvement.
- More Smart Art than the 2007 version, and pretty useful ones.
- The older Office button has been replaced by a much more useful Office tab with control over printing etc.
On the negative bits, it is quite slower on launch than 2007, and the online help has not been updated to reflect extra options.
On the whole though, I like this better than 2007 edition, and hopefully they will have some more additional features before the final launch.
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