Review by PD

Having used almost every edition of Office since the mid 90s, I’m usually pleased with the new features Microsoft adds in (sometimes buggy but the idea is good). I’m also an early adopter, I started on Office 2007 in November 2006 through my MSDN Subscription, so I’ve used that version for 3 years. What I was hoping for is exactly what I got: taking the totally new user interface of the 2007 Ribbon and making it more robust and the apps more solid. 2010 adds some very good features such as the Backstage tab to handle most file functions. The Preview and Print page is OUTSTANDING, you change Page Setup and Printer settings and see the change in a preview, then hit the big Print button and off you go. I know we sort of had that before, but this is a clean one-page solution very similar to soft-proofing in Photoshop, and to me is worth the price of admission (almost, more on that in a second).

The way Outlook now keeps track of threads (chain of Replies to an original email) really brings it up to date. You can locate one of the replies in a thread of emails and Outlook will reveal the other emails and tell you if you’re not responding to the latest Reply, and give you a way to get there in one click. NICE.

Those are my favorite features so far, obviously with a suite this big youy could use it for a year and still not cover it all. See the review from Surgery100, he/she did a great breakdown of each app in the suite.

OK, why 4 stars and not 5… simply this: you have to pay full price for this version, no upgrade pricing (that I’ve seen) from 2007 has emerged. That’s a bit stiff to swallow, I hope Microsoft changes that. At any rate, this, to me, is the best Office so far. Oh, and this version does include OneNote! The previous Pro version didn;t, and that is a big addition. If you haven’t used OneNote, I highly suggest you look into it, you will not find a better way to store all of your info and notes and lists and plans and screen shots and… you get the idea.