Review by Michael J. Tresca

I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft. On the one hand, it’s obvious the company has really just taken disparate products and mashed them together. On the other, this becomes less of a problem with each version that comes out as Microsoft continues to improve on getting them all to work together seamlessly. After my stint as a tech writer for Lotus Notes I can speak when confidence when I say that although I hate most of Office, I hate Microsoft’s competitors so much more. We got this for my wife, who works on a Mac.

Of the programs included, we primarily use Word and Excel – she more than I since she handles the finances – and because I frequently create presentations for my speaking engagements, PowerPoint. Never used OneNote. Ever.

As a student version, this edition doesn’t include Access or Visio, which is fine with me. I used Access probably 10 years ago and gave up trying to create a database. I didn’t realize Visio was still around, having used it once back in the 90s before Microsoft brought it into the collective. Microsoft Office’s biggest competitor has always been itself: I use Excel to track projects instead of Project and PowerPoint instead of Visio in both cases.

So what’s new with this version? Probably the biggest improvement is in collaboration. Word and PowerPoint introduce co-authoring, which is basically typing on the same document, even in real time. A lot of this stuff are innovations that have been the de facto nature of working on the web for some time – look kids, you can see who has access to a document (thanks Google docs!). There’s also cross-platform collaboration (a necessity if you’re going to introduce co-authoring) and a more natural help file integration.

Perhaps because I’ve been working in an office at a Fortune Five company for 15+ years, the thing I’m most excited about is the new PowerPoint templates: treemap (which displays patterns), waterfall (trends moving both up and down), Pareto (useful for quality control in tracking to a data set), histogram (data frequency), box and whisker (uh, displays outliers but I don’t have much use for it), and sunburst (a circle displaying hierarchical data). It’s the little things.

If you’re new to Office, this isn’t necessarily going to convince you of how awesome it is. Instead, Microsoft is doing its due diligence to ensure that Office is up to the standards web users have come to expect. And that’s not a bad thing.