Office 2010 11-24-09

Microsoft is on a beta kick these days. Last year, they made a beta version of the New Xbox Experience, the new update for the Xbox 360 that came out Fall 08, available to over 40,000 Xbox LIVE users. In January, they made a beta for Windows 7 available and followed it up with the Release Candidate in May. As of last week, the big MS has made a beta for their Office 2010 suite of software available. Here’s the kicker: all of these betas have been excellent, but I’ll talk about Office here because it’s the new hotness.

I’ll get the performance stuff out of the way first. It’s fast. The splash icon that pops up before the program does tells you what it’s doing now. You can even kill the program when it’s starting up from the splash icon in case you accidentally open the wrong program.

Visually, it’s a refinement of the 2007 suite of Office. The Ribbon menu system is still here, but it has been touched up a bit. It has even made its way into Outlook. So in short, if you hate the Ribbon, you’re still not going to like 2010, but I love the Ribbon.

For those that don’t know, the Ribbon was designed to fix a complaint that they had gotten from power users and noobs alike. Microsoft had received numerous requests for features for Office programs. The issue is that the vast majority of them were already there, but buried under menus. The Ribbon put all of the features of Office in tabbed horizontal “ribbons.” A testament to how good the Ribbon is that complaints for it stopped quite quickly after 2007 was released. It was that easy for people to get accustomed to.

So, to wind this back into 2010, all of the programs in 2010 use the Ribbon now, and they’ve made refinements to it. Instead of the Office logo gem in the top left corner of the screen, there’s a little button next to the Home tab that servers all of the same functions while being on the same horizontal plane. Also, they’ve been color-coded to remind the user as to which application they’re using.