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Exploring Microsoft Office 2010 beta

Posted on 17 Feb 2010 at 17:37

Simon Jones explores the changes between the technical preview and beta of Office 2010

Buying decisions

When Office 2010 is finally released in June, one way you’ll be able to get hold of it is preloaded on a new PC, and in this scenario you’re likely to find you have the new Office 2010 Starter Edition. This contains the whole of Office, but electronically hobbled to make only cut-down versions of Word and Excel available to you.

Microsoft says the restrictions on these crippled apps involve their “Advanced” functions only, but its definition of “Advanced” must differ slightly from mine: I can see the argument for not supporting VBA macros, mail-merge and certain chart types, but there’s no View tab on the Ribbon and you can’t insert or edit Smart Art diagrams – something that you can do in the Office web apps that are also free.

Microsoft says this discrepancy is deliberate, because “Office Starter and the Office Web Applications have been designed with different usage scenarios in mind, and as such, the associated feature sets are optimised for their usage scenario”.

Formatting features that are disabled in Starter Edition will still show up in documents created by other editions, but you just won’t be able to create or edit those items with Starter Edition

However, I think it’s more likely to be the result of some unco-ordinated thinking between two different development teams. Formatting features that are disabled in Starter Edition will still show up in documents created by other editions, but you just won’t be able to create or edit those items with Starter Edition.

You can freely use these Office Starter Edition apps for as long as you want – these aren’t time-limited trials, but they’ll always show a task pane on the right-hand side which, as well as showing useful links to more information about the task in hand, will also show adverts – usually about upgrading to a full Office version or buying other Microsoft products or services.

If you want to upgrade Office 2010 Starter Edition you merely need to purchase a product key online, or from a bricks-and-mortar retailer as a “key card”, and then enter the product code, which will unlock the full functionality of whichever edition you’ve paid for. The Starter Edition is set to replace Microsoft Works, which until now has been Microsoft’s free productivity suite to be given away with new PCs.

Click to run

Another purchasing option – if you don’t get Office 2010 preloaded – will be “Click-To-Run”, where the Office application code is streamed to your PC a feature at a time, as you need it. Microsoft says it will take less than two minutes to start using Office 2010 via Click-To-Run for a UK user with an average-speed broadband connection.

If you try to use a feature that isn’t already installed on your PC, there will be a short delay while that code is streamed in from the internet. Microsoft says that, wherever possible, the technology will anticipate your requirements for a feature to minimise any delays, but I’ve yet to see Click-To-Run myself to put this claim to the test.

The co-authoring of documents, one of the much-vaunted new features in Office 2010, is exhibiting some limitations now that we arrive at beta test stage. Microsoft says that, at launch, the Office web applications delivered either through Windows Live SkyDrive or through SharePoint will support co-authoring in Excel and OneNote web applications only. Co-authoring will not be available for Word documents through the Word web app.