Microsoft Office 2010 review

OneNote 2010
OneNote is Office’s little used information gathering and casual work coloration tool. Some of the most interesting changes here are in the ways it works with other data stores. You can now add notes straight from Internet Explorer, though only from the Tools menu, with this feature crying out for a plug-in.

You can dock OneNote permanently to side of your desktop, even if it rather irritatingly refuses to resize content to its narrow window size. And you’ll soon be able to create online notebooks using the OneNote web app, just like you can with competitor Evernote.

At least, Microsoft says you’ll be able to do that. It hasn’t actually managed to make the feature available at the time of launch. Good ideas all, but their application could have done with a bit more polish.

Conclusion

Not covered here in detail are Publisher and Access, the key extra features you get with the, far more expensive, Professional Edition of Office 2010. Publisher still doesn’t live up to stand-alone DTP packages, while Access (a database management system) isn’t of widespread interest to most home and small business users. If you need to build a database for your company, then you might want to consider buying this edition, but there’s nothing here for anyone else.

Office 2010 isn’t the massive overhaul that the 2007 edition was. However, there are numerous small improvements. If you use multiple Microsoft Office applications every day, for either personal or business reasons, then we feel it’s a worthwhile upgrade for Office 2007 owners – and an essential for Office 2003 users. If you only use the most basic aspects of Office applications, or use them irregularly, then try the free OpenOffice or Googledocs first – as these should cover all your needs, and the latter’s simplicity of use online betters Microsoft’s at present.