Microsoft Office 2010 RTMs: Impressive New Tools

Online, April 22, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 and the products that go with it (SharePoint, Visio, and Project) have been released to anufacturing (RTM), and I was actually a bit surprised by how little attention the announcement got, considering just how many of us use Microsoft Office. Office 2010 will be available to volume license customers next week, to other corporate customers on May 12, and to the rest of us in June.

The lack of hype surrounding the RTM may be due to the fact that we all take Microsoft Office for granted. Most of the time we use the same basic features over and over again and notice it only when something doesn't work the way in which we expect.

Office has long had very little competition in packaged software: Corel's WordPerfect Office is still available at a good price, and OpenOffice, the open-source alternative now sponsored by Oracle, is available for free. Both do a fine job with basic word processing and spreadsheets and offer pretty good compatibility with the Microsoft Office formats, but Microsoft Office has a deeper array of features, and it just does more.

You can complain about some of the formatting features in Word or PowerPoint or about the quirks in Outlook, but you'll certainly find more features than you will with the competitors. And while there are decent alternatives to those products, for most organizations, Microsoft Excel is really the most indispensable product in the suite. Every significant financial department I know uses Excel, and that includes features like PivotTables and macros. There's really no good alternative. That means in just about any office, you'll have some people using some features that require Microsoft Office, and since organizations love to standardize, Office becomes the standard for almost everyone.

Microsoft Office has been behind in one really important feature, though: collaboration. That's where Google Docs and other Internet-based productivity suites (such as those from Zoho and Glide) have a big advantage. Microsoft has added collaboration features to Office 2010, but I'm not ready to judge them yet. That's clearly going to be a big battleground over the next year or two.

Google Docs just got a lot of attention for its recent upgrade, which the company says offers more competitive features, better compatibility and a new HTML 5-based way of working offline. It sounds good, but I haven't tried it yet.

But in many ways, the real competition to Office 2010 is more likely to be the older versions of Office that people are running today. Simply put, Office 2003 or 2007 work pretty well, and not everyone will see the reason to upgrade. Indeed, I know many workers who found the UI change between 2003 and 2007 to be quite jarring, even though in the long run, most tended to like it.

In addition to better collaboration tools, Microsoft Office 2010 features a new "ribbon UI" for Outlook, several impressive new tools for Excel, and the ability to crop videos directly in PowerPoint.

Check out PCMag's first look at the beta as well as my intial impressions. I'm sure we'll both have more to say as we get our hands on the final product, but I have to say I've found many of the new features quite useful.

Still, it's interesting how little attention Office is getting, at least in the media. Microsoft says 7.5 million people have downloaded beta copies, so someone much care. But my guess is, at this point, Office is good enough, and most people just take it for granted.