Office 2010 ups ante
Microsoft’s Office 2010 is now available in beta and scheduled to be released in June next year. This new release of the popular office productivity suite is both an ambitious one for the software maker as well as being a very important one.
Although Office is dominant in the world of productivity applications – Forrester estimates 80% of businesses use it – its share of the market is for the first time under real threat. The growing popularity of alternatives such as OpenOffice, Zoho Office, Symphony and Google’s Docs could begin to bite into Office’s market share in the coming years. And as Microsoft’s key desktop application, a declining market share for Office could have wider ramifications for the company. With Office entrenched in the market most users will continue to use Windows as the primary platform to run it. But as other alternatives become popular other platforms, such as Linux, or even web-based ones, will become enticing to users.
Which makes Office 2010 a key release for Microsoft in the coming year.
The primary, and most important, focus of Office 2010 is to make Office available to users across all the platforms they are likely to use. Irrespective of whether users are using a desktop PC, a mobile phone or a web browser, Microsoft is hoping to make Office seamlessly available to them.
On the desktop there will be five editions of Office 2010:
- Office Home and Student which includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote;
- Office Home and Business which has the same plus Outlook;
- Office Standard which also includes Publisher;
- Office Professional which adds Access; and
- Office Professional Plus, with SharePoint Workspace and InfoPath.
In addition to these there will be browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.
Desktop changes
For desktop users of Office 2010 there are a number of new features, the most interesting of which are a new screen capture and image editing tool, protected editing modes, a revamped options page and OneNote integration by default.
The integrated screen capture and editing tools are likely to be very popular with users because they greatly simplify the process of including graphics in documents. The integrated screen capture tool allows users to capture a screenshot of the current desktop and embed it in a document in a single action. Using the image editing tools users can perform actions such as removing the background on an image embedded in a document, or just cutting out a portion of an image. The tool is called “background removal” and gives users basic image editing capabilities without needing a separate tool such as Photoshop. Obviously this doesn’t replace Photoshop for complex image editing but is perfect for most users.
Security controls
Security has also been beefed up in Office 2010. The main changes in this area are controls to manage who can edit documents and how they can do this. For example, there is a protected mode which makes any Office document downloaded from the Internet read-only until the user enables editing mode. This has its advantages for sharing documents but could become annoying over time.
A more useful feature is the restricted mode which gives authors fine-grained control over who can edit documents and the limits of what they can do to the document. For example, authors can restrict formatting changes to a selection of styles, limit editing to certain areas of the document or block certain authors from making changes.
The one feature that will make many users happy is the inclusion of OneNote by default in Office 2010. OneNote is a note-taking application particularly popular with tablet PC users who use a stylus to input text into Office. Previously OneNote was a premium option for Office but with this release it will be included as standard in every release of Office 2010. This is very much in line with a general trend towards touch-screen interfaces as a key method of managing applications.
Multimedia and Outlook
Also in line with current trends is a strong focus on multimedia capabilities in Office 2010. In addition to the image editing tools already mentioned, Powerpoint 2010 can embed YouTube content in slides natively. Previously this was done using a third-party plugin but is now a default capability of Powerpoint 2010.
Outlook also gets a boost in Office 2010 including, among others, a “conversation” view of incoming email, not unlike Google’s GMail. In addition Outlook also includes an “ignore thread” feature which allows users to hide ongoing conversations that they are not interested in.
Download
A free, public beta version of Office 2010 can be downloaded from the Office 2010 beta site. The beta version includes all the major components of Office 2010 and will expire in October 2010. According to Microsoft more than 1 million copies of the beta have already been downloaded to date.
Microsoft Office 2010 – discussion
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