Microsoft Office 2010

Largest change to Office 2010 is the availability of both a 32- and 64-bit version of the suite. The leaked CTP’s SKU is Office 2010 Professional, which comes with the basic apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher) and other more advanced apps (Access, SharePoint, Visio, Groove).

On start up, there are new animated splash screens for each application. The start up times are also remarkably faster than previous versions of the Office suite. Opening Word or Excel can be done in around 2 seconds and Outlook in 4-5 seconds, which is extremely fast (depends upon PC configuration) .


The ribbon menu which was introduced in office 2007 is continued in all of the Office 2010 applications. Some alteration is done to look and feel of ribbon so that it can blend nicely with the upcoming Windows 7 operating system. You can now hide the bulk of the ribbon menu by clicking a small arrow button on the right side of it, which is useful for users with a smaller screen space due to the use of a small screen resolution.

Another major change in the ribbon menu, that is Office application’s menu button, which was formerly round, has been replaced with a colored tab that appears first on the ribbon. The tab’s color depends on the Office program (ie: blue for Office, green for Excel, and yellow for Outlook).
By clicking it will open whole interface transforms into a new menu-window. Along the left side of the window there is a column of options that are specific to the program that’s open. For example, Word’s options include Save/Open/Close, Print, and Share.

Print feature is no longer appears in a new window, but rather a new column where all the various print features can be adjusted. Microsoft has removed one features of Office 2007, the Quick Print button, which used the default print settings and sent the document to the printer in only one click.

Microsoft has added a few security features to Office 2010. The one that users will mostly often come across is when they open a downloaded document in Word 2010. When you do so for the first time, the ribbon is hidden and all editing is also disabled. A red Protected View notification appears letting you know the file was downloaded from the Internet and may not be safe to open. You can then click on "enable editing" and Word will return to normal.

Microsoft will also be debuting its new Office Web, which are online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

It should also be noted that if you have a previous Microsoft Office suite installed on your PC, such as Office 2007, you can keep them installed alongside Office 2010 (with the exception of Outlook, which it will uninstall for you). If you elect to install Outlook 2010 and you currently use an older version of Outlook, it will move all of your e-mails, contacts, and calendar items to the new version...but export your data to a .PST anyway just to be safe.

If you would like to sign up for the Office 2010 Consumer Technical Preview wait-list, you can visit Microsoft's Web site to sign up. They say that not everyone on the list will be invited to the CTP preview, but it doesn't hurt to sign up now.