Office 2010 hitting testers in July

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 13 May 2009 at 17:13

Microsoft has confirmed that it will begin shipping technical previews of Office 2010 to testers in July.

The software giant broke the news at the TechEd conference, announcing the preview would be "invite only" and encompass "hundreds of thousand of people".

Microsoft says "it will scale the test version to users beyond those at TechEd" at some point, but hasn't provided details.

The preview edition of the software suite will include Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint though Microsoft is remaining coy on specific new features.

"We aren't ready to start demoing and sharing all of the features quite yet," says Reed Shaffner, Microsoft product manager.

Shaffner confirmed it will require the same specification PC as Office 2007 - that means a 500MHz processor, 256MB RAM and around 2GB of free storage space. It will run on XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Little is known about Office 2010, though early videos have shown that Outlook has adopted the Ribbon interface. The other notable addition to the suite are lightweight online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

To sign up for the technical preview, visit the Office 2010 site.