Microsoft announces Office 2010

Posted on 13 Jul 2009 at 18:08

At its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft has today revealed Office 2010's full details along with its plans for an accompanying online application suite.

"Office 2010 is the premier productivity solution across PCs, mobile phones and browsers," said Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft. "From broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualization capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word, we are delivering technology to help people work smarter and faster from virtually any location using any device."

The major shift with this version of Office is the online suite, which features lightweight browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. These new cloud-based applications will enable users to continue working with their documents when they're not in front of their own PC, but a preview of these new applications will not happen until sometime in August.

What's interesting though is that, unlike Microsoft's current web-based applications such as Outlook Web Access, the new Office apps will have the same functionality across Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (and probably Chrome and Opera). Everything is managed via JavaScript - there's an impressive demo of Excel Web running in Firefox, complete with a number of fairly advanced Excel features, in this video.

In addition to the web suite, there's enhanced usability and better cohesion across the whole suite. This includes better co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010, as well as advanced email management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook 2010, including the option for users to ignore unwanted email threads.

Indeed, it's Outlook which has gone through the most changes. It now features the ribbon interface throughout as well as a new feature known as Quick Steps, which allows you to turn regular tasks into single click tasks. There's also a new conversation view which groups email by subject, and there are new Scheduling Views and Calendar Groups in the calendar module as well as improved control for who sees what in your schedule.

Interestingly, Microsoft has decided to simplify the Office product lineup as there will now only be five versions of Office with 2010 instead of the eight different Office 2007 versions. These will be Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional and Professional Plus. Here's a list of what each version comes with:

• Office Home and Student Edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote
  
• Office Home and Business Edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and OneNote and will replace Office Small Business Edition
  
• Office Standard Edition is the entry-level enterprise option and includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher and OneNote
  
• Office Professional Edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, Access and OneNote and is the high-end consumer version
  
• Office Professional Plus Edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, Access, SharePoint Workspace, InfoPath and OneNote. It's the high-end enterprise solution

Upon release, access to the online suite of applications will be available through Windows Live at no cost (with no Office licence required), on site for Office volume licensing customers and via Microsoft Online Services, where customers "will be able to purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering."

Author: Tim Smalley