The Technical Preview for Office 2010 was officially released today, and I installed it as soon as I got the invitation. This was the fastest and smoothest installation of Microsoft Office that I’ve ever experienced. Installing in a Windows 7 VM on Virtual PC, the initial setup took only a few minutes (as in “less than five”).

Here’s the trick: the programs apparently aren’t really completely installed just because they appear in your Start menu. When I opened Word, a balloon pop-up informed me that the program may appear to be unresponsive while it gets the files it needs. In fact, the virtual application manager will indicate that programs are downloading in the background.

Nonetheless, Word was ready to go in only a minute or two. Having spent many a day waiting half an hour to an hour for some previous versions of Office to install, I found this nothing short of amazing.

The best thing about Office 2010, in my opinion, is the new Outlook. Now it has the Ribbon interface, too. I know some folks hate the Ribbon, but I’m a big fan of it. Here’s the Outlook 2010 virtual app:

I especially love the Quick Steps feature which lets me create one click buttons to perform my most common multi-step tasks. For instance, I can click the “To Tom” button to forward the email message I’m in to Tom.

But if you don’t like the Ribbon, you can get rid of it with a quick click of the little “up” arrow in the right top corner.

A handy feature is the Ignore button on the Home tab. This will move both current and future messages in the selected conversation to the Delete folder. So if you really, really don’t care to see any more of that particular thread that’s gotten nasty on one of your email discussion lists, it’s easy to zap it away.

Ribbon tabs

Here are screenshots of the various Ribbon tabs (click to enlarge):

But here’s the really cool part: now you can customize the Ribbon the way you want it. You can even create your own tabs. Just right click on the Ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon.

This is true for the Ribbon in all the Office applications.

You may also notice that the old big round Office Logo button has been replaced by a new, rectangular one (in the same location). Clicking it gets you a redesigned interface for selecting options for the Office application you’re in:

There’s lots more, and I’ll be looking at each of the other Office 2010 applications here in more detail in the days to come, but this should give you a little taste of some of the changes in the new and improved Office.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com