On Tuesday, Microsoft Office 2010 began appearing on retail shelves, and a lot of people have asked me whether they should upgrade. The answer, as always, depends on what you are going to do with the product.
In general, I think this is a more important upgrade for larger businesses than for home users and small businesses. But it does have a number of neat features many individuals will like.
I’ve been using Office 2010 as my primary office suite, and have to say I’ve been very happy with it. Here are the five new features I think will be most attractive for home and small business users:
The Return of the “File” Menu: A lot of people liked the “ribbon” user interface that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007; and a lot of people hated it, at least at first. If you currently use Office 2003 or earlier, you will still find the change a bit jarring and it will take you some time to get used to it, but after a few weeks, you probably won’t notice it unless you were a power keystroke user.
But one thing that tripped up a lot of people has been notably fixed. There is again a “file” tab in all of the applications, so it’s pretty familiar for users of the older version. Clicking on it brings up all the controls for saving, sharing, printing, and so on, in what Microsoft calls a Backstage area.
The name is a bit hokey, but the organization of the page gives you much easier access to all sorts of options, such as previewing what you are printing and saving to different file formats. It can be a real time-saver. One suggestion: I added the “Quick Print” option to the “Quick Access” toolbar on the very top of the Window, so I can again print without going to a menu.
Word’s Navigation pane: A version of this, called Document Map, existed in earlier versions, but it’s been markedly improved. You first use styling to indicate the different levels within your document–title, headings, and so on. Then, when you turn on the navigation pane, all the headings appear in an outline fashion on the side of the screen. You can just click on a heading to navigate to it, or rearrange your document by dragging headlines. I find myself using this all the time.
PowerPoint video editing: The new version lets you import a video clip into PowerPoint and then trim the clip, setting start and end points. It sounds simple, and again, you could always use a separate video editor to to this. But it’s incredibly convenient to have this capability within the presentation tool itself. In addition, PowerPoint adds a number of ways for making a video look better within a presentation.
Better graphics editing: Just about all the features now include new tools with which you can better edit graphics within your documents. The one I’ve used most lets you remove the background from a photo fairly easily, so you just get the parts you want. Sure, you could do this with a graphics program, but being able to do it within your document in much more convenient, and I’ve found myself using it more and more. There’s also a new feature for doing screen captures.
Sparklines: These are “in-line” graphics that you add to cells in a spreadsheet, letting you see trend lines at a glance. For instance, if you have monthly sales listed for each product, one more column in the grid can now just show a tiny chart representing sales.
Those are the five features inside the basic Office 2010 that I think are of most interest to consumers and small businesses. But of course the biggest change is….
Online Apps: The biggest change in the 2010 versions is the ability to edit and create your documents online, with Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These applications are free: They are meant to compete with free online Web applications from Google Docs (or alternatives such as those from Zoho or Glide), so you don’t need to buy Office 2010 to use them. Documents are stored on on Skydrive, a Microsoft service that you can log into with a Hotmail or Live password. Microsoft is initially limiting this to 25 gigabytes, but that should be more than enough for most casual users.
If you buy Office 2010, though, you’ll find that integration with the online applications is a bit easier. You can create the documents locally, then use options in the Backstage area to save directly to Skydrive and share them. And you can take documents you created online and just simply click “open in Word” to move them to the desktop version for more advanced editing.
I found the online apps to work pretty well, for online applications, though they’re not advanced as the desktop versions. Microsoft talks about how they do a better job than competitiors of preserving the look of documents as you import and export from the desktop equivalents, and certainly, even complex documents did look quite good. For instance, in Word, basic editing was simple, and the word processor worked well with tables and inserted graphics; but it lacks the fine control of photos, charting, and reviewing options that the desktop version gives you.
Again, you don’t need Office 2010 to use the Web apps, but it makes using them easier. Web apps are pretty new, so I haven’t done a lot of sharing with them so far, but it does seem like a credible entry in the market.
If you’re a business user, a number of other features may be more compelling to you: Outlook now has the ribbon interface, with a social connector and a conversation view; the Web Apps can be used with SharePoint so you can share documents more easily on an internal server; and Excel can now handle bigger models, offers an easier way to work with Pivot Tablets, and adds PowerPivot, an in-memory tool for dealing with lots of data. (More on these later.) My guess is that the Excel and Outlook upgrades will be enough to make a lot of businesses want to upgrade.
Here is PC Magazine’s full review of the complete suite (note the Home and Office version just includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and lists at $149 for the boxed version that supports up to 3 PCs, and $119 for the Key Card version). And here’s a post on how Office uses the latest PC hardware.
As I’ve said before, I’m surprised at the number of people who take Microsoft Office for granted. Yes, there are open source alternatives like Open Office, other reasonable traditional packages such as Corel’s WordPerfect Office, and now a number of good online tools such as Google Docs, Zoho, and Glide. All of those are more than adequate to create a basic document or add up a set of numbers, but none has the depth of features as the traditional boxed Microsoft Office.
In short, for the home user, if you have Office 2007 and just use it locally, you’ll find Office 2010 a useful but not necessary upgrade. If you have an earlier version of Office, though, now may be the time to think about upgrading.
Originally posted to Michael Miller’s blog, Forward Thinking.