First look: Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 is finally out of closed beta and into the open. Here, PC Pro's resident Microsoft Office expert - Simon Jones - gives his first impressions of the updated look and feel, the big new features, and what's changed in the major applications: Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010.

Click here to jump to our preview of Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint 2010.

Click here to read about the five new versions of Office 2010 and which programs will be included in each of them.

The suite as a whole
As a suite, Office has never been as unified as it is now. All the applications have virtually identical user interfaces. They all use the Ribbon, the new Backstage View (the replacement for the File Menu) and common features really are common, working exactly the same way in multiple applications.

The philosophy of this release seems to be on improved usability - making the essentials work as you the user would expect, and on future-proofing - anticipating users' future needs such as including video-editing tools in PowerPoint.

With SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 enables even better group collaboration with multiple users easily being able to edit the same documents at the same time.

Look & Feel

Forrester Research surveys have shown that the percentage of people who liked the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 was in the mid to high 80s while the percentage who found it "significantly more difficult" to use was 2.4%.

Unfortunately, with 500 million people now using Office, this translates to 12 million people who perhaps won't be happy that the Ribbon interface is now ubiquitous throughout Office 2010.

On the other hand, the data Microsoft has gathered through the Customer Experience Improvement Programme has been fed back into the design of the Ribbon in Office 2010 and some changes have been made. Many of the changes immediately visible are small and cosmetic but there is still time for this to change.

All the applications look very grey, as they did in Office 2007 Beta 1 before the stylists got to work on the baby-blue, green and black colour schemes.

There are other colour schemes promised in the Options dialogs but they are not there yet. Many icons are just red, orange or yellow placeholder dots but it looks like the icon designers have been very busy already designing icons for all those old menu items in Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, InfoPath, Groove, Visio and Project that have now been replaced by buttons on their brand new Ribbons.

The Ribbon tabs look a little different, perhaps less cluttered, as the borders on all the small buttons have gone, leaving just the icons, and separator bars are used instead of borders and gaps between button groups. Group captions are less distinctive than in 2007 but this may make the dialog launcher icons stand out a little more.

Most of the application splash screens have swirling green and orange patterns at the bottom and they excitedly tell you which add-ins they are loading or try to give you confidence by saying they are "Still working...". A good thing, because they can take quite a time to start.

This sluggishness is to be expected at this stage in the code's maturity as it is doing extra checking and logging and has yet to be optimised.