Hands-On Preview of Microsoft Office 2010

Barence writes "Microsoft has announced full details of Office 2010 and its plans for an accompanying suite of online applications, and PC Pro has been given special access to a technical preview. Contributing Editor Simon Jones gives his initial verdict on the new suite, concluding that there's 'still a long way to go in terms of fit and finish ... but overall Microsoft has made good strides in increasing usability, cohesiveness and collaboration.' This is followed by detailed first looks at Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010, with Outlook certainly looking to be the greatest beneficiary. And finally, a gallery of screenshots shows off all the new interface touches in Office 2010, including Outlook's conversation view, Word's picture-editing function and the new cut-and-paste preview option."

Comments

ODF

[bogaboga]

Any traction on solving or at least improving Microsoft's ODF implementation? The last time I checked, there were serious issues with the implementation.

By the way, how does Office 2007's "Save-As-PDF" feature compare to the real thing?

Re:who uses it anyway?

[polar red]

me neither.
office 97 had enough features already. the bloat continues ever forward.

Re:ribbons

[je ne sais quoi]

Well it's a good thing that your incredulity doesn't override statistical evidence.

You want statistical evidence? Look here, from a survey of Excel users from May, 2009:

Month in and month out, the respondents have said that Excel's Ribbon has reduced their productivity by an average of about 20%. And users with a negative opinion of the Ribbon estimate that it's reduced their productivity by about 35%.

They found that 36% of advanced and 29% of intermediate users "hate or dislike" the ribbons, which vastly outweighs the people who "love or like" the ribbons at 20 and 24%, respectively.

How 'about them apples?

Re:ribbons

[dedazo]

In my very humble opinion, and as an additional (possibly worthless) data point, people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything (like me).

The rest of the demographic that tends to use Office software - you know, the millions of corporate users that still have the default background, theme, sounds and everything else that originally came with their laptop or desktop - the ribbon tends to be a little baffling at first and eventually extremely useful to them, because it mirrors the way they work. That's the reason it was designed and why it was introduced with 2007.

Microsoft places much more importance on the latter group and tends to make design decisions based on their working habits and patterns. If you are part of the first group, it's best to get used to that fact.

And of course, there are millions of people still using Office 2003 and even 2000.