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REVIEW SUMMARY – If my review was tl:dr for you, this will give you a quick summary

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Office 2007 is pretty perfect for my needs, its simple to use with the ribbon interface,

has all the excellent programs a home/student user would need and is quite cheap these days.

Office 2010 is a very minor upgrade, everything remains in the same place mostly, there are

minor additions to the programs such as in Word, you have more picture options, and in Excel

can make graphs inside cells. But for the price, it is not really a worthwhile upgrade if you

are working well with Office 2007. My advice would be to avoid this until an inevitable price drop.

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STARTUP & APPEARANCE

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Office 2010 does start up a bit quicker, but only by a second if that. That being said,

on a powerful PC it is nice to see your blank document open up almost immediatley. For the

majority though, the difference will be non-existent, or will not amount to anything useful.

Appearance is almost identical to Office 2007. Classic ribbon interface above. However, the

Office ‘Orb’ button has been replaced with the old File menu. This now provides a list to your

left with all the common tasks of opening, saving, sending, printing, and recent documents. On

the right handside is the detailed options of the menu selection, on the Print section for example

you now have a nice preview without needing to open up print preview, all the printer options now

have nice big icons, everything seems a tad more user friendly.

You can also customise the Office program colours to blue, silver and black. It’s a nice touch i think

as i can now blend the Office suite into my dark Windows theme. Nothing major, but im easily pleased!

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NEW FEATURES

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- Ribbon interface is now in all Office programs including Outlook & One Note

- You can now fully customise the ribbon to add your own buttons and tabs

- More user friendly file menu with left navigation pane has replaced ‘Office button’

- In Word 2010 you can now easily make screenshots with a few clicks using the ribbon

- Office 2010 has more artistic effects and styles to use on your photos (e.g colour correction)

- Videos can now be edited within PowerPoint, very simple editor but works well, includes effects too

- Outlook now has an ignore button which gets rid of conversations you don’t want (both

current and future messages relating to that thread)

- Easier control options over conversations in Outlook using right click menu

- Using the custom ribbon interface you can add common tasks you do in Outlook

- New Smart Art designs

- Excel sparklines and slicers. Sparklines are tiny charts that fit into cells. Slicers are objects

you can use to filter data in pivot tables

- Existing documents opened up for the first time use Protected Mode. There is no ribbon available,

and you cannot edit them. Click enable editing to turn to the usual mode. Nice safety feature.

- Simulatenous editing. Now 2 people can edit the same document at the same time. Great for collaboration.

Not a great deal, but some genuinely handy features in some applications.

I would see if you really could make some use out of them before thinking of buying.

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WEB APPS

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To try and compete with the monster that is Google, Microsoft are now offering Web versions of

its Office programs with each desktop version you buy. These are like Google Docs, but are the familar

Office programs you have come to love. They simply open in your web browser, and allow you to share your

work with others online. Good for people who travel a lot, and the Microsoft SkyDrive (online storage space)

should come in handy. There a few things to consider though:

1. Only available for Word, Excel, PowerPoint (and OneNote, but this will be at a later date)

2. Only compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (no Chrome, wonder why)

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PRICE TAG

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As above, it’s a bit too expensive right now. For what you are getting, which is a very minor upgrade

i don’t think it is worth it. However, a price drop is almost inevtiable. And when it happens, i think

Office 2010 would be a nice upgrade.

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CONCLUSION

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I know i am happy with Office 2007, it does everything i need it to do. 2010 was nothing special,

some of the features did seem useful but i can live without them. I think for the majority of people,

Office 2007 will more than suffice for a few more years, or until 2010 comes down in price.

For those of you who use the suite day in and day out, most of the day, then this could be worth looking

at definitley. The small upgrades and few new features won’t seem like much initially, but after a while

you will start to like them. Again, that’s only if using something like Word is your day job.
Rating: 3 / 5

Made the mistake of buying Office 2007 with its “improved” ribbon interface prior to actually using it presuming it to be a natural improvement over 2003.

Within a week I was having to fork out even more cash for a classic menu’s add-on, not going to make the same mistake again, if you haven’t experienced it I strongly urge people to try it either in a store like one of the DSG groups display systems or if you have friends or family that actually bought it.

Sure you can re-lean how to do it all from scratch, personally I would rather remain productive, in some of the companies I have visited that made the “upgrade” even a couple of years after the changeover simple tasks which staff members used to take for granted are now a chore wrestling with the unwarranted interface re-design.

As is often argued, by no means were they all weathered staff that were set in their ways, Many “new to office with 2007″ users that I have seen using the applications simply don’t know anything about the functionally they have access to as its not plastered across the Ribbon and most of the people that know what’s been lost simply cant find it in this convoluted mess of access tabs, it’s only saving grace being the customisable “quick access tool-bar” which in itself is severely limiting and additionally many don’t even seem to even know exists, it also happens to be a massive step back in productivity and design in the opinion of every person I have spoken with face to face that are forced to use it, the only people I can find defending this interface change are Microsoft employees or anonymous on-line users.

With 2010 they have re-vamped the Ribbon instead of listening to the consumer base, they purport to let you customise it further yet still ignore the “classic” interface alternative that has been the staple for years and as far as I’ve seen why the few that did purchase 2007 removed the product and went back to 2003 within a month to simply “get things done”.

I’m guessing someone will be trying to sell us a compatible 2010 version of “Classic Menus” next week as with the 2007 release.
Rating: 2 / 5