First impressions of Office 2010 Professional Beta

05 Jan 2010

Have you downloaded Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Beta yet? I have been running it a short while and have to say it's pretty impressive so far, the interface feels simpler yet slicker and the whole package feels a lot quicker (the application start up does feel a tad slower but from there on it feels quicker) and there are lots of nice little touches to help make you more productive.

Outlook has a new Quicksteps area in the toolbar offering fast access to typical functions including Move To, Team E-Mail, Task Completion, and Reply & Delete. The Rule area has a new simplified look (with an Advanced option adding more conditions) and on the main screen there is now an Ignore option (which lets you ignore all future threads to a message), and a Clean Up function. Junk email management is also on the toolbar instead of being buried in an option somewhere.

Outlook 2010 has a Text Messaging Connector allowing you to connect up to your Outlook Mobile Service hosting provider, you just need to provide your service provider web address, user ID and password. If you don't have a service provider yet, a link leads to a selection including the usual suspects of Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile.

One word of warning, it's worth scanning through your existing Outlook add-ins (under the Developer tab) as they may not be compatible with Outlook 2010. I experienced difficulty with at least one until I disabled it.

In Word and Excel the Smart Art function has more options added offering new ways to visualise data (Hexagon function, Alternating flow, Funnel, and Half Circle Organization Chart, for example). Excel 2010 in particular has a raft of new visualisation tools on offer giving new ways of looking at your long lists of data.

All of the applications can now save and share files online using SkyDrive, which when set up (needs a Windows Live ID – it will be interesting to see if there are some back-end Active Directory connectors available), offers an online storage location (giving up to 25GB), where you can view and, soon, even edit (with basic editing tools) your online files when on the move.

You can read more details about my first impressions of Office 2010 in this article – Working With Office Professional 2010 Beta – which talks about the new Screenshot feature, some of Excel's new data visualisation tools and the new SkyDrive feature.

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