Microsoft Office 2010 : general public launch

Microsoft will today launch the general public version of their Office 2010 suite.

Almost a month after the enterprise launch, Microsoft today makes their general public versions of Office 2010 available. This release has generated a lot of interest as the public beta released in November 2009 generated more than 8 million downloads around the world, representing three times more downloads than the Office 2007 beta release.

This new engine of one of Microsoft’s leading programs is for the first time available in 32 and 64 bit versions. Nevertheless, for common users, Microsoft considers that the 32 bit version is more than adequate for most general data needs as it allows for files of up to 2 GB. The 64 bit version has also seen some compatibility issues with existing Office extensions.

Included in this new version of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite, PDF files are now natively supported. The Ruban user interface has been generalised across all elements including Outlook 2010 which will benefit from an Outlook Social Connector function, allowing users to connect to their social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace). The program also uses the video card’s GPU to accelerate the execution of certain operations, like in PowerPoint 2010 where it is possible to integrate videos.

In Word, the integration of photos has been greatly improved. For Excel, the Sparklines function allows you to integrate graphics into a cell and visualise tendencies. An interest object can also be related with a SkyDrive space of 25GB so that you can share and store all of your documents. In this space, you can also edit documents in the OpenXML format, which anyone in the world can then access, no matter if they use Office 2010 or not, via Office Web Apps – light versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The actions available in the light versions are restricted and you won’t be able to work with locally installed programs in as greater depth as Office 2010, with Microsoft therefore not considering that Office Web Apps as a direct competitor to Office 2010. We will nevertheless have to see if most home users require all of the advanced features that come with Office 2010, or whether they can perform everything that they require with Office Web Apps.

With it being possible to install onto any Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista or 7 machine, the Office 2010 range contains three releases for the general public and small businesses:

• Office Home and Student 2010 (installation on 3 PC’s): Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
• Office Home and Business 2010 (installation on 2 PC’s): OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
• Office Professional 2010 (installation on 2 PC’s): OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access.

The prices of these three products cost respectively $149.99, $279.99 and $499.99 for the boxed version with installation disk.