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 :