I’m in holiday right now. I received invitation from Microsoft to test their Office 2010. I’ve downloaded it (with my HSPDA card which is very slow (5 to 40 KB/s) here). It looks like they took the time to improve everything in order to reach the level of Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2007. These 3 products haven’t changed much, they just have some new colors, a new special menu and some new little features.
I know that they have made some other great improvements everywhere, but what I can see is :
Each office app loads in a very short time.
Each office app has a new Office button from which one you can do lot of advanced things, on your current document or your current application. It’s called the backstage view and it’s very pretty.
Outlook has been significantly improved, it doesn’t seem to get every pixel of each mail from your hardrive anymore.
… well, in fact I spend much more time on Visual Studio than I do on the Office suite applications …
You should just take care about something : If you have Office 2007 (which is only available in 32 bits) and you download Office 2010 64 bits version like I did, you will have to uninstall Office 2007.
I’m really glad I had the chance to download this software legally. Now, dear Microsoft, if you could send me a tech preview of Sharepoint 2010 I would be super happy. This is quite disturbing because you gave me access to Sharepoint Designer 2010, but that’s the software I hate in the (rare) Microsoft SharePoint 2007 tools.
Here is the email invitation I received :
