Office has an unenviable task: getting organizations and individuals excited about undertaking a major upgrade of a platform whose previous versions have been handling users' productivity chores just fine for going on 10 years now. The beta of Office 2010 shows extended Web and mobile reach, as well as a number of useful enhancements across the suite's apps.
At
its Professional Developers Conference last year, Microsoft gave the world its
first look at Windows 7 in the form of a pre-beta release that struck me as practically
ready for prime time-a good sign for a Windows release tasked with restoring
user confidence following the little-loved Windows Vista.
At
this year's show, the company has arranged a beta debut for its other flagship
product, Office, which has its own unenviable task: getting organizations and
individuals excited about undertaking a major upgrade of a platform whose previous
versions have been handling users' productivity chores just fine for going on 10
years now.
Like
that Windows 7 pre-beta I evaluated last year, the beta release of Office 2010
has performed with striking stability and polish in my tests. Even many of the
help pages, which I always expect to be missing from development releases, have
appeared right where I've needed them as I've trawled through the product.
As
for the question of how to stoke user interest in a product upgrade that lacks
a flaky elder sibling, the Office team has gone beyond its typical "more
handsome, more handy" playbook to expand the reach of Office beyond the PC to
include the Web and mobile devices in a manner more meaningful than in previous
iterations of the suite.
Even
if broadened Web access options and more SharePoint-orchestrated collaboration
choices aren't the driver for upgrading to 2010, I imagine that most Office users
will find items out of those handsome and handy categories to like in the new release.
Setting
aside enhancements in the areas of cut and paste, picture and video editing,
data visualization, and Web-based access to Excel and PowerPoint that I
discussed in my review of the Office 2010 Technical Preview release,
I took note in the Office 2010 Beta of new ways to slice and dice data in
Excel, a raft of application-building enhancements in Access, and new uses for
the side pane in Word.
Microsoft
is making the beta release of Office 2010 available for download through MSDN.
I
conducted my tests of the suite on a single-core desktop machine with 1GB of RAM and
running the 32-bit version of Windows 7. I also tested on a virtual machine
running the 64-bit version of Windows 7, as well as on a VM running 32-bit
Windows XP Service Pack 3.
Office
ran happily on all three setups. However, I missed the opportunity to test Microsoft's
new PowerPivot add-on for Excel, which expands the maximum number of rows that
Excel can crunch well beyond the app's typical million-row limit, due to
problems I experienced with the add-on's installer.
Look
for coverage of PowerPivot-as well as of Outlook, PowerPoint and other
2010 features-in our future reviews of
the Office suite.
As Editor in Chief of eWEEK Labs, Jason Brooks manages the Labs team and is responsible for eWEEK's print edition. Brooks joined eWEEK in 1999, and has covered wireless networking, office productivity suites, mobile devices, Windows, virtualization, and desktops and notebooks. Jason's coverage is currently focused on Linux and Unix operating systems, open-source software and licensing, cloud computing and Software as a Service. Follow Jason on Twitter at jasonbrooks, or reach him by email at jbrooks@eweek.com.
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