Office 2010

[weesteev]

Office 2010 is now upon us... is anyone using this yet? Whats your thoughts, any better or just the same as 2007? Is the ribbon a better feature or a hindrance?

Im using the Ultimate x64 version and the speed difference is certainly noticeable when it comes to dealing with large spreadhseets in Excel. Outlook 2010 is also a massive improvement.

Thoughts?

www.openoffice.org

or, for Mac users, www.neooffice.org.

Save yourself a small fortune.

[weesteev]

Originally Posted by Chris

www.openoffice.org

or, for Mac users, www.neooffice.org.

Save yourself a small fortune.

Haha nice try Chris, some people do actually enjoy using Microsoft Office... and even use it in their work as well. This question isnt so much aimed at personal use, but general use. Some users may encounter this in their work already.

The reason I ask is how visually different the product is to previous versions, Office 2007 tried to mix things up with the "ribbon" bar which wasnt very user friendly, now in 2010 its fully customizeable which is certainly an improvement... and we have 64 bit versions of the full suite now (including Visio which you dont get with OpenOffice, or a native 64 bit OpenOffice suite either for that matter).

[chris9991]

I've used the Beta for a little while and it doesn't seem to be much different to 2007. You get a File tab as opposed to the Windows icon.

The one thing I think is useful is the Data Analysis in Excel has been improved with regards to PivotTables

Originally Posted by weesteev

Haha nice try Chris, some people do actually enjoy using Microsoft Office... and even use it in their work as well. This question isnt so much aimed at personal use, but general use. Some users may encounter this in their work already.

The reason I ask is how visually different the product is to previous versions, Office 2007 tried to mix things up with the "ribbon" bar which wasnt very user friendly, now in 2010 its fully customizeable which is certainly an improvement... and we have 64 bit versions of the full suite now (including Visio which you dont get with OpenOffice, or a native 64 bit OpenOffice suite either for that matter).

Horses for courses really. Many people do work with MS Office in their offices, of course, but even there, for most people the more arcane aspects of it are irrelevant. I am quite certain that the vast majority of people don't know whether the PC under their desk is 64bit. I also reckon the majority of them don't even know what 64bit means. And for most of them, their PC requirements are such that 64bit is unnecessary. Visio, also, is pretty specialised software and AFAIK is not found in MS Office bundles, even though it is branded as part of Office.

Then of course you have the home users ... who, once again, are unlikely to have any need of any of the functions of MS Office that might justify the £100+ price tag. The only things that are putting Office in home users' hands are OEM pre-installs and high brand awareness. But I maintain that the vast majority of home users are wasting their money if they actually go out and buy Office, and that businesses are wasting vast amounts of cash on volume licences that are far larger than they actually need to be.

[weesteev]

Your totally correct, the cost doesnt make sense for the home user these days. Even the basic "home" and "student" versions which only supply the same functions as OpenOffice are not worth the cash.

[Hom3r]

I bought the Office Home and student 2007 edition, comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint & One Note, Definately worth the £60 I paid for at Comet. (Stand alone cost, not with new PC)

TBH if you use office at work I would buy it for home, I would have liked to have got Access, but there was no way I could aford it with no income.

[haydnwalker]

MS Access is the bain of any database admins life No good imho for anything other than creating an address book

[AntiSilence]

Originally Posted by haydnwalker

MS Access is the bain of any database admins life No good imho for anything other than creating an address book

I used to use Access databases in some of my WinForms projects, but ONLY for applications that are single user and for non-critical back-end data storage only. But even this is a bind, as there's no 64-bit engine to access the MDB, so I have to force compile to 32-bit.

I've since started looking into the SQL-Lite provider for Visual Studio so I can use SQL Server databases without the server (I know SQL Server Express can be installed locally, but that's too much to ask of users for small applications IMO).

I know of a big company that had their entire employee training records database in an Access database. But, as if that wasn't bad enough, it was shared on a network so everybody could open it in Access and view/edit/delete any information in there!

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Hom3r

I bought the Office Home and student 2007 edition, comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint & One Note, Definately worth the £60 I paid for at Comet. (Stand alone cost, not with new PC)

TBH if you use office at work I would buy it for home, I would have liked to have got Access, but there was no way I could aford it with no income.

Ugh. I hate Access. God awful package full of features that sometimes seem designed to get in the way of properly implementing a database.

This next bit isn't aimed at you specifically, it is more a general question.
As for 64 bit, how on earth does that make any difference to the average user?

The primary advantage of 64 bit applications is that they handle *large* amounts of data than 32 bit apps.

To create that kind of size file in Word, you'd need to a create a document that had a lot of graphic, and 10s of thousands of pages long.

Most home and office users wouldn't use Word or Excel for documents that are that large.

Powerpoint could conceivably generate slideshows large enough (if you bung in lots of sound, video and graphic), and Access could conceivably generate databases large enough. Although if any company is using Access to manage that amount of data, they really should consider using a dedicated Database server running Oracle or SQL Server.

[Lord Nikon]

One more thing against Orifice 2010 - the purchasing system has changed.

1) There is no longer an upgrade price. All copies of Office 2010 must be bought at full price.
2) Of the 3 versions of office 2010 on sale, 2 are home versions.
3) If you buy the keycard version it is licensed to one machine with no transfer possible.

Quite ironic, really - I've just had my work laptop upgraded to Office 2007, although I've been using a 'Home Use Programme' Office 2007 version on my home PC for over a year now. This is the arrangement where an employee of a company with a corporate licence for Office can use an official 'free' copy at home for the cost of the media & postage - mine cost about £17 for the 'Enterprise' edition...

So if Office 2010 becomes available under a similar deal I will probably 'go for it'

[Acathla]

Our companies 'Home Use Programme' already offers Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 as a download for £8.95.

Although I get copies via my Technet subscription, I still decided to take advantage of this.

This is the link, although you need your works program code: http://www.microsofthup.com

[downquark1]

Worth noting students can get it cheap:
http://www.microsoft.com/student/off...b/default.aspx

[vanman]

here,s a goodie
Office 2010 Trial Extender

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/downloads...?catId=14&id=7