Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

So I am going through my email yes­ter­day and I come across an email from Tech­Net announ­cing the beta of Mic­ro­soft 2010.

Even though I am a huge sup­por­ter of Open Office, I deci­ded to give it a try. Since I already had a Hot­mail account, the regis­tra­tion was very sim­ple and within 5 minu­tes I was down­loa­ding the installer.

One of the first things I noti­ced when I began to ins­tall the appli­ca­tion, was the options that were not selec­ted. As seen in this screenshot, very few fea­tu­res are ins­ta­lled by default.

The ins­tall did seem to take a bit lon­ger than nor­mal, how much was part of the ins­ta­ller ver­sus my test machine is unde­ci­ded. None the less the ins­ta­ller did not take more than 20 minu­tes or so. Since I spend more time in the Word appli­ca­tion that was where I hea­ded first. It does appear that MS did lis­ten to a lot of users con­cer­ning the start orb and has repla­ced it with the File tab. The remain­der of the rib­bon bar looks remar­kably the same.

When you do go to the file tab, you get a lot more infor­ma­tion at your mouse point without having to do a lot of digging.

So off I go. As I men­tio­ned I use Open Office by default, so the first thing I did was open one of my docu­ments crea­ted in Wri­ter. It did take a few moments to bring the docu­ment up, but all of my for­mat­ting (such as it was) remai­ned. I could even save it back into the .odt exten­sion. There was the war­ning that the for­mat was not com­ple­tely com­pa­ti­ble. I ope­ned the file in Wri­ter again and everything was gol­den. That was a big check mark in my books right there. Mic­ro­soft has been drug over the coals (right­fully so) for not being more com­pa­ti­ble with other appli­ca­tions, this is a good step forward.

The next thing I wan­ted to look at was how it hand­les wri­ting to a blog (not just Mic­ro­soft Live spa­ces). I rea­li­zed how happy I was for the file menu to be back. With a cou­ple of clicks I was being promp­ted to setup my blog con­nec­tion. I selec­ted Word­press and ente­red the ser­ver and login infor­ma­tion. Next time I know, I am wri­ting the entry right now. One of the great fea­tu­res is the screenshot fea­ture. Like the snip­ping tool in Vista and Win­dows 7, the screenshot tool is won­der­ful. When you go to insert you see the option screenshot, with the down arrow, you have the abi­lity to just grab a full win­dow or use the snip­ping tool. All of the ima­ges in this post were crea­ted using this format.

So far, I must say I am actually impres­sed with the direc­tion of at least the Word por­tion. I will play with the excel por­tion later. Check back…