10 Reasons to Try Office 2010

Office 2010 is now available for purchase worldwide, having hit the store shelves both in traditional retail outlets and in online shops on June 15th, 2010, two months after the productivity suite was released to manufacturing. Released in Beta in November 2009, Build 14.0.4536.1000 went on to be downloaded in excess of nine million times over the course of the five months that separated the first public testing milestone from the final stage of the development process. In terms of Beta size, judging by the sheer number of downloads, Office 2010 outperformed the testing program built for what went on to become the world’s fastest selling operating system. Windows 7 Beta downloads stopped at the eight-million mark, according to Microsoft.

Concomitantly with the general availability of Office 2010, Microsoft also gave the green light to free trial downloads of the finalized version of Office 2007’s successor. There are no less than three SKUs available for download, namely Office Home and Business 2010, Office Home and Student 2010 and Office Professional 2010. If you were to ask me, I would recommend you tried Office Professional 2010 out of all the free trial editions available for download, as it is the complete variant of the product available at retail, with an impressive array of components including: Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, Access 2010 and Publisher 2010.

Make no mistake about it, Office 2010 is a major, new version of Microsoft’s productivity suite. Customers that have not tested the successor of Office 2007 while in development now have the excellent opportunity to take the product out for a spin. I included a list of top reasons why trying out Office 2010 should be a very tempting experience below.

1. Did I mention it’s free? Just like it was the case with Office 2007, Microsoft is serving free trial downloads of Office 2010. Users will get to test the RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 for a good 60 days before the product expires, at which time they will be offered the option to buy a license, and continue running the productivity suite.

2. It’s Microsoft Office, do you need anything else? With Office 2010, Microsoft continues to provide the most complete and comprehensive productivity suite on the market. Now spanning the desktop, the Cloud and mobile devices, Office 2010 simply doesn’t have an equivalent in any of the third-party productivity suites available on the market, be them free or not.

3. Modest system requirements. By any standards, Office 2010 only requires a most hardware infrastructure, and can go as low as a 500 MHz CPU, with a recommended 512 MB, and 3.0 GB of free space. Like I said, modest is the key word. This means that even users with older computers still running Windows XP SP3 can download, install and test Office 2010 without any problems.

4. Top performance. I have been a Beta tester for Office 2010 since Microsoft released the Technical Preview ahead of the actual Beta in 2009. And while I don’t have actual benchmark results, I was impressed with the speed of the productivity suite’s components on several of my computers. On my home computer, by far the best machine I own with a 3GHz procession and 4GB of DDR3, Office 2010 simply flies. But, at the same time, it also performs excellently on my work machine, and older PCs with a 2GHz CPU and just 3.37GB of usable RAM.

5. You can now touch Office. Look at it any way you want, but NUI (natural user interfaces) are the future. And, provided you own a touch-capable computer and run Windows 7, there is no reason why you shouldn’t get a more hands-on experience with the productivity suite.

6. Office Ribbon. Speaking of NUI, the evolution of the Ribbon/Fluent graphical user interface from Office 2007 to Office 2010 delivers a more streamlined user experience. Granted, the Ribbon might seem scary at first, but, once you get the hang of it, you see just how antiquated the traditional menus will feel. And Ribbon customization is one of the best aspects of the UI, allowing users to tailor the experience in accordance with their preferences, work style, etc.

7. Going mobile. Office Mobile 2010 is defined as a rich mobile productivity companion for Office 2010. Users will only get the mobile flavor of the productivity suite provided that they buy it together with a Windows Phone. Office Mobile 2010 will come preinstalled on a range of devices, allowing the productivity suite to span to a new screen. Word Mobile 2010, Excel Mobile 2010, PowerPoint Mobile 2010, OneNote Mobile 2010, SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 and Outlook Mobile 2010 are all available on Windows Phones with Office Mobile 2010 preinstalled.

8. Reaching for the Cloud. Share, collaborate, access files from anywhere and from a variety of devices, store content online, all free of charge via Office Web Apps. Available via Windows Live SkyDrive, Office Web Apps only require users to have a valid Windows Live ID.

9. Stay social right from Outlook. With the Outlook Social Connector, Outlook 2010 offers users the possibility to get an overall, centralized perspective over their social networking life, and remain connected to friends on Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn or MySpace. Fact is that more and more Microsoft products and services are embracing social networks, and Outlook 2010 is a great example of this.

10. Test-drive new features and capabilities. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about Office 2010 trial releases is that they offer users a chance to test some of the new features that the productivity suite brings to the table.

I recommend you try out co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Excel Web App, and OneNote 2010, but there are additional aspects of the components that wait to be discovered. The Backstage is an excellent example. The Microsoft Office Backstage contains all the elements of the traditional File menu, centralized in a single location, simplifying management.

Word 2010 comes with enhanced photo-editing capabilities, while PowerPoint now offers video and broadcast features, and Excel contains Sparklines, a new feature that enhances the way users visualize data. And there is more, for example OpenType typography in Word 2010 and in Publisher 2010, the new Paste with Live Preview feature, the improved Navigation Pane in Word, the enhanced Conversation View in Outlook 2010, etc.

By all means, feel free to download a free trial edition of Office 2010 via the links below and dive into the new productivity suite from Microsoft.

Office Home and Business 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

Office Home and Student 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

Office Professional 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

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