Microsoft Office 2010 was reviewed in early 2010 by many software test labs, magazines, and major newspapers. The reviews for those who buy Microsoft Office 2010 were glowing. Never before had a software suite combined so many great features that had a very general appeal to just about everyone who had ever used the clunky office software offerings of the distant past. This mature office software is certainly light years ahead of the early versions of Microsoft Office of 30 years ago.

New Technology

There were many welcome changes that were applied by Microsoft developers suite-wide. For one thing, Microsoft has pushed the suite’s applications interface into the 21st century with speech interface technology. This is presented in its minimum configuration as Text-To-Speech (TTS) output from Outlook, OneNote, Word, and OneNote. Some editions also include PowerPoint 2010, Excel 2010, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, SharePoint Designer & Workspace, MS Project, Visio, and Lync (now called Skype for Business).

Another major improvement was the ability to have a “Backstage View” for instant menu selection of all the different formats and special operations available for saving and altering documents created by all the 2010 Office applications. The newly introduced “Save & Send” options give the user much more direct control over how data is saved and how it is shared with others. Beyond this, the “Ribbon” interface has also been improved to the point that reviewers of the product finally decided it had been implemented correctly. It has reduced the complex multi-level menus of past versions and is entirely customizable. Perhaps more importantly, the Ribbon interface is now intelligent in its offerings based upon the user’s current context with their data.

Many Possibilities

Of course, which edition you choose when you buy Microsoft Office 2010, is a factor of what you want to use it for. There are versions for home use, student use, small business operations, and for big enterprise business users. The list of features is so extensive, especially as of the major release in 2010, that I will not go into them here. Suffice it to say that just about any operation you need to perform, there is some feature that supports it. There was a time, not too many years ago, when the feature set had burgeoned with so many esoteric features that general confusion reigned. This is why Microsoft carefully parsed the much-loved office tools suite to include only the features used by the majority of people. The result is a cohesive set of features that are easier to learn and use.