Download Free Ribbon/Fluent UI Interactive Guides for Office 2010

Over the past weeks, Microsoft has released a number of resources designed to get customers running older versions of its productivity suite such as Office 2003, become easily familiarized with the evolution of the graphical user interface in office 2010. Softpedia readers have already been able to read about and download the Word 2010: Interactive menu to ribbon guide and the Excel 2010: Interactive menu to ribbon guide. However, there are additional downloads from Microsoft focused on unraveling the mysteries of the Office 2010 Ribbon/Fluent UI for additional components of the productivity suite.

In addition to Word 2010 and Excel 2010, the following Office 2010 components also have Ribbon UI interactive guides available for download: PowerPoint 2010, Publisher 2010, OneNote 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010, and InfoPath 2010. There’s quite a gap between the old interface in Office 2003 for example, and the new overhauled UI in Office 2010. The redesign is bound to leave some users perplex, especially customers that know the old Office by heart are guaranteed to at least raise an eyebrow when faced with the new UI.

Still, Ribbon is extremely logical, and superior in every way to the old cluttered menus and submenus, and it at least deserves a try. With resources such as the interactive guides, Microsoft is obviously doing its best to smooth transition as much as possible.

“One of the really nice features of these interactive ribbon guides is that they are fully visual and allow you to navigate to the command you are used to using in the older version of Office and it will not only tell you where to find it in the Microsoft Office 2010 ribbon, if you click the command, it will actually show it to you visually on the Office 2010 ribbon,” revealed Eric Ligman, Global Partner Experience Lead Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group. “Download and try out any of the interactive ribbon guides above for the Microsoft Office applications you use today. I think you will really like how easy these are to use!”

The interactive guides are essentially Silverlight applications designed to run inside the browser, so users should make sure to have Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash installed on their machines. Below users will also find the download links for the free trial based versions of Office 2010 RTM.

- PowerPoint 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - Excel 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - Publisher 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - Word 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - OneNote 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - Visio 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - Project 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide. - InfoPath 2010 Interactive menu to ribbon guide.