Jigsaw's Blog: My thoughts on games (and other stuff)

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta Impressions

Microsoft publicly released a beta for Microsoft Office 2010 Professional yesterday. Normally I’m not a fan of beta testing another company’s software for them,but since the Windows 7 Release Candidate runs so nicely on my home system I decided to give it a shot. I mostly use Office for Outlook, Word, Excel, and the occasionally Visio Viewer.  So, those are the only components I installed.  Word and Excel both are pretty similar to their version from Office 2007, but with little tweaks. Maybe I’m missing it but I’m not seeing anything major that is different.  I’ve used both for some work today and they functioned fine and I did not have any trouble finding the tools I need.  Outlook has a few more changes than the other components, but so far I’m liking updates.  A lot of the ones I’ve tries seem like they can save time in doing common tasks.  However, the one things that really surprised me is that Outlook seems to be running a bit faster than the older version.  Outlook tends to be a resource hog because I have a large amount of emails that I don’t archive. The first time Outlook started it took a few minutes because it was going through its first start-up steps, but every time since then it seems quite snappy.

So far I’ve not had any issues with any of the Office Products and I’m curious to try it out with Microsoft’s Office Live Workplaces.  Should be a nice way to have commonly used documents available from any of my systems.

If you’re interested in trying Office 2010 you can get it here. Just keep in mind that it is Beta software and could crash at any time.

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