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.\u00a0 So, those are the only components I installed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’ve used both for some work today and they functioned fine and I did not have any trouble finding the tools I need.\u00a0 Outlook has a few more changes than the other components, but so far I’m liking updates.\u00a0 A lot of the ones I’ve tries seem like they can save time in doing common tasks.\u00a0 However, the one things that really surprised me is that Outlook seems to be running a bit faster than the older version.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Should be a nice way to have commonly used documents available from any of my systems.<\/p>\n