cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Office 2010 Beta

David_W
Rising Star
Posts: 2,305
Thanks: 33
Registered: ‎19-07-2007

Office 2010 Beta

I bit the bullet so to speak and decided to give it a try today, I went for the Home version which uses something called "click to download" or some such nonsense.  First impressions was that it looks really nice, the changes to Outlook are really fantastic giving the ability to view emails as conversations including not only received but sent emails in a conversation, useful for keeping track, less useful when you use webmail.plus.net so you miss a lot of sent emails in the conversation.
It has some nice features, but my biggest concern is the click to download.  I'm on Premier Option 1 with a 20Gb limit and 13Gb soft cap, this month I went over the soft cap so when 4pm came along, Office became, to all intents and purposes, useless.  When you fire up an application (like Outlook) it starts to download the stuff you need to use, and as it's Microsoft the downloads will come from servers listed by PlusNet as a download server.  You can imagine how slow it's going to be to try to use productivity software that requires a constant fast internet connection!
Now, I'm going to be starting an OU course in October (IT and Math) which will allow me to take part in "The Ultimate Steal", currently the offer for students is, Office Professional 2007 and Windows 7 Home Premium for just under £40, by the time I start my course it should be updated to Office 2010, at that price I'll take a look just as long as it's not the click-to-play version that's available.
I can see the appeal of click-to-download, I really can.  Office can be a HUGE installation jam packed full of features a person will never know exists, let alone use, so a smaller installation with quicker load times can only be seen as a good thing, if however it continues (as is my experience) with a constant download every time you start, people on limited download caps or with throttling of download servers peak rate may want to look at either sticking with older versions of Office or looking seriously at Open Office.
Anyone else had experiences with 2010?
4 REPLIES 4
pierre_pierre
Grafter
Posts: 19,757
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: Office 2010 Beta

Sounds like M$ are in Cloud Cuckoo land again, that god for open office
Oldjim
Resting Legend
Posts: 38,460
Thanks: 787
Fixes: 63
Registered: ‎15-06-2007

Re: Office 2010 Beta

http://us1.office2010beta.microsoft.com/default.aspx?culture=en-GB
Quote
Microsoft® Office Home and Business 2010 Beta
Enhanced tools and features help you to run your business, connect with customers and organise your household more efficiently. Office Home and Business 2010 features new photo, video and text effects for creating stand-out documents and presentations.
DOWNLOAD NOW
This Beta product is delivered via Click-to-Run, a streaming technology for use on high-speed internet connections. If you are not on a high-speed connection, please download Office Professional 2010 Beta instead.

VileReynard
Hero
Posts: 12,616
Thanks: 582
Fixes: 20
Registered: ‎01-09-2007

Re: Office 2010 Beta

Quote from: dgwebb
Now, I'm going to be starting an OU course in October (IT and Math) which will allow me to take part in "The Ultimate Steal", currently the offer for students is, Office Professional 2007 and Windows 7 Home Premium for just under £40, by the time I start my course it should be updated to Office 2010, at that price I'll take a look just as long as it's not the click-to-play version that's available.

You certainly don't need anything expensive for the OU - they even offer you Open Office on CD.
If you are doing Maths, you would probably find something that offers a front-end to LaTeX much more useful.
e.g. LyX

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

David_W
Rising Star
Posts: 2,305
Thanks: 33
Registered: ‎19-07-2007

Re: Office 2010 Beta

@Oldjim - They did have that version, and I did contemplate going that route (I probably will download that version tomorrow) but for the majority of people they will pick the home version, as it seems simpler (and really it is, the full d/l will be in ISO format knowing MS), so if the home version of Office is the download version which err downloads, I think it'll have a large effect on home users?
@A Fox is Evil - Sort of 50/50, just over a year ago I was doing an IT course in college, was an Access to HE course doing database/spreadsheet/word/etc. and the software used on the college computers were loaded with Office 07 and all the work was done on that, so without Office you couldn't work through the given worksheets (unless you really knew your way around OO in which case the HE course would be below your abilities - I was there not for the course, which was easy, but for personal reasons relating to my health).  Still, £40 for Office and Windows 7 = bargain (not including Dreamspark which gives tons of expensive software for free!)