Office Starter

Most of the computers we see arrive in the office have a trial copy of Office that lasts for 60 days, sometimes with a copy of Microsoft Works. Works is being retired in favour of Office Starter, limited versions of Word and Excel that should be enough to get by if someone sends you a docx or xlsx file. There’s a separate PowerPoint Viewer.

Microsoft has also made some effort to make getting started easier. Instead of having separate icons for the different Office programs in the Start menu when a new computer arrives, there is a single Office icon. Selecting this displays a window with the option of entering or buying an activation key for the full versions of Office or using the Starter versions.

I might have happy(ish) memories of using Works at university, but I think that this simplification is a great help.

Backstage

As well as changing the Office button the menu that appears has changed as well. Menu is selling it short slightly as it takes up the whole screen. Called Backstage it takes care of all the publishing tasks such as printing, saving or posting to blogs.

Multimedia

There are more tools for making presentations more exciting in PowerPoint with some basic video editing possible without having to use a separate program. These can be used to crop videos and are non-destructive for the most part so you can go back to the video later.

Given that this can lead to so fairly large presentations there are also tools for preparing the presentation for emailing. Depending on how aggressive you want to be, this can discard cropped sections of videos.

YouTube videos can be embedded into presentations but they’re not saved within them, so an internet connection is essential during the presentation. I wasn’t able to insert an flv file from my computer into a presentation in Powerpoint 2010 Beta.

Custom Ribbon

One of my frustrations with the Ribbon was that the layout in Office 2007 is completely fixed. I’d just created my own taskbar in Word 03 the week before I heard about the Ribbon so it felt like a step backwards. It is now possible create a tab in the Ribbon with your own selection of icons, along with macros.

Working together

Office Live is going to improved to make it easier for several people to work on a document at the same time. The ideal is to use the normal Office programs, and I found that they will open automatically when trying to edit a document online if available. The online versions won’t have all the functionality of their desktop equivalents. If there’s is a section of a document that cannot be changed with the online editor it will be left alone.

Microsoft has also acquired office.com so there’s no need to use office.microsoft.com.

Versions

More good news is in the simplification of the different versions of Office:

Office Home and Student: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote

Home and Business: All of the above with Outlook

Professional: All of the above with Access and Publisher

I predict some controversy over the end of upgrade versions although this may depend on the pricing of the full versions.

Overall

Office 2010 looks like it has some genuinely useful improvements on 2007, especially if you want to work on documents with other people and don’t have access to an Exchange server.