Office 210 Has been Released - What's not to like and What I do like

Well it's official. The new version of Microsoft's venerable OFFICE Suite has been released - Office 2010.

And there is a lot to like about it... for the most part.

These are my very first impressions of Office 2010 and are by no means conclusive. My introduction to it was not installed on a production machine.. I'm just not that crazy. Right now Syncing between my virtual desktop, blackberry and iphone work perfectly and I can't afford the time to screw that up.....at least not yet.

When I first migrated to Office 2007 from the 2003 edition i came face to face with the new ribbon interface. Let's just say that I did not like it, didn't like it at all.

For a time I kept Office 2003 and 2007 running... I was not immediately willing to submit myself to "The Ribbon". Over time the Ribbon Prevailed. It was something that made sense once "You Learned It" Problem was you had to learn it, it was not intuitive to many users (Especially we mature computer users who were brought up on Wordstar, Wordperfect, Perfect Cal, Quattro Pro etc.... After all we could still use our keyboard for quick formatting of text.... who needs icons and a GUI (Graphical User Interface)

When Office 2007 was released and I first adopted it, I was relieved that the ribbon GUI didn't make it into Outlook. There were many changes that I liked, including a GUI i was mostly accustomed to.

While the GUI in Office 2010 has improved dramatically in Word and Excel for instance, the final iteration of Outlook 2010 was an even more pleasant surprise. Early beta releases I had experienced were not, shall we say, exciting.

The final default GUI is shown in the image above. Is it a Ribbon? You betcha it is but..... it is actually very intuitive and offers a great deal features right off the GUI (Graphical User Interface )..

What did I like right off the bat?

This may be the single most important indicator of potentiality with this iteration of OFFICE. When I set up the first account it offered, by default, to create a new PST ( office data file ). Wow. Sure enough, I added another new email account and, by default, it offered to create a new PST file for that as well. The PST files created included the email account name associated to it.

Tres NEAT! I huge improvement to our ability to manage large amounts of email data.

Bravo Microsoft! At least so far. I wonder... will my sync tools work???