MS Office 2010 Beta now available

[NorrisCell]

Free download on Microsoft's site.

First impressions: Outlook is garbage. They took a lot of th common menu items and tuned them into tabs and ions. Way too much going on. More is not always better.

Excel looks good. Haven't tested Word yet

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

[mgo]

Free download on Microsoft's site.

First impressions: Outlook is garbage. They took a lot of th common menu items and tuned them into tabs and ions. Way too much going on. More is not always better.

Excel looks good. Haven't tested Word yet

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

I was a little underwhelmed with 2010 too. The icons and GUI now have a "plain jane" look with flat looking objects. Since I do not use Outlook as a mail client, just as a PIM, I've got no experience with the mail part of it. I tried Outlook for mail, and it was not very "fun" when I would try and read mail items. Excel, OneNote and Word were sufficiently intuitive with little or no noticeable improvements.

I think I'll stick with Office 2007 till the "cows come home", and let others deal with 2010.

[A31]

I had this product on my main PC (the ThinkCentre) for a little while and I have to say, it isn't very good.
The problems
.WordArt is now terrible, I really CANNOT stand the way you have to do it. Where has the multi coloured text gone? And some of the othern WordArt options available in Office 2003/2007?
.It looks boring, even when you fiddle around with the colour scheme - and it just likes look Office 2007 with the "office button" missing.
.Here's another bad thing. What I love to do in Office 2007 Word is copy and paste pictures of the Internet into Word and change the shape of the picture (in Office 2007 you can change it from like square/rectangular to circles and "lightning bolts" etc), but in Office 2010, you cannot cange the shape of a picture you inserted into the document...?
.The Office button (which I am a fan of in Office 2007) is now gone and has been replaced with the "File" tab, which is just like a massive long menu of the things you can do.
.There's about 100,000 copy & paste options, most of them you'll never even use, so that's wasting space, RAM etc.
.Included in Office 2010 Beta is the Microsoft Send-a-Smile thing, which is fairly annoying (it appears in the little bar at the bottom where your sound controls, AVG controls and for me, Bluetooth controls, are.)
.And MS Office 2010 Professional Beta takes just over 1GB of space, and yet MS Office 2007 Professional Plus takes just 500MB of space!! So your using more space for all those silly WordArt and cut and paste options.
.And finally, if you go back to a previous version of MS Office (like I did, I went back to Office 2007 Professional Plus), when you open Outlook in Office 2007 again, you get a message everytime you start it up saying "The profile "Outlook" was created in a newer version of Office, it may not work in this version" etc etc. I just click OK to that but I'll tell you, when you click "OK" it's fine, no need to worry. When you try to open Outlook 2007 in a hurry and it comes up with that "annoying" message, it gets so agravating!

The only evidence I have that it ever existed on my computer is I still have Visio 2010 Beta, I have to as I don't have Visio 2007. Other than that, Office 2010 Beta (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and all the other funny things it comes with!) are gone, off my PC.

So as you can probably tell, this product is rubbish I think and I'll be sticking with MS Office 2007. Luckily it's only available until late 2010...and you won't be able to use Office 2010 Beta, you'll have to buy it!! (I can't see myself doing that!)