Office 2010 Tech Preview

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Office 2010 Tech Preview has proved to be another painless transition.

Having taken the pain with the 2007 version, I had grown accustomed to the Ribbon menus and in fairness, I am not entirely convinced of their merit.

They are quick to access but I am not convinced that they are more efficient than before.

I base this on the fact that I also use OpenOffice a fair bit which is pretty close to the 2000 and XP versions of Office, and I didn’t really notice that much of a productivity boost in either.

Now, that said, I am not the most demanding of user and Word, Excel and the odd bit of basic PowerPoint ( my sins in which I fully expect to pay for i the next life). Also, I am a tinkerer and so tend to create macros and customise menus to suit my most common actions. In that respect 2010 is very accommodating and there was nothing expected that was missing.

Bar one thing: I opened up a standardised template Excel spreadsheet that I had used successfully in 2007. It opened fine, and I filled it out and saved it and then went to print form it. Now, the print area and parameters had been set to print landscape and fill an A4 sheet within the predefined margins. Version 2010 seemed to think that the print area was about 12mm by 9 and was akin to a 3D barcode.

Try as I might, with all available permutations, I got no joy. Now I am perfectly willing to hold up my hands and say I made a bags of it, but all I can say is if it was something I was doing wrong, it was not an obvious fix.

Of course, to add salt to the wound, forwarding the spreadsheet to a colleague with 2007 produced a beautifully printed version, to which I had been accustomed.

That said, it is a minor gripe and this is a technical preview and so there might a few, rough edges, as opposed to actual bugs.

In general, it is responsive and, in so far as I am a long standing 2007 user, intuitive.

One key thing I have found is that Outlook 2010 seems particularly resilient. On a few occasions I have clicked on things that required external content or had attachments that were not recognised files types and the like, and instead of that dreaded greying out that precedes a crash, it seems to gather itself and come back without a problem. Not once has it actually become inoperative.

For a mail client, with my usage patterns, I regard that as rather good.

Read More: Paul Hearns