Introduced in 2007 the Ribbon now completes its integration into all of the office applications. Although it regularly draws criticism, there’s no doubt that, particularly in the field of formatting, this toolbar-on-steroids really does allow someone with limited design skills to produce documents with a much more professional appearance. The new version of the Ribbon also addresses one of the regular criticisms of the previous version in that it’s now customisable.
The mysterious application-orb that first appeared in 2007 has now been changed to a much clearer File menu which now encompasses the backstage-view. This is a new view that groups together document related items that could sometimes be hard to find in previous versions such as Print Preview, Versioning and File Permissions.These changes are now suite-wide, making Office 2010 feels much more co-ordinated than Office 2007.
Although the popular Professional version is a hefty £361+VAT (nearly £100 more than in the states even accounting for currency and tax differences – thanks Microsoft) there are some much better value editions that could be of interest. The Starter edition is no doubt aimed at supplanting the Microsoft Works software that frequents new PCs. It contains only Word and Excel, but some of the more complex features have been disabled, and the software is also ad-funded, with an advertisement shown down the right hand side. Home and Student edition includes the main applications in the suite apart from Outlook, but for £88+VAT, this version can be installed on 3 PCs. Home and Business edition is still reasonable at £192+VAT for two PCs and also includes Outlook.
There are more editions available; for a full breakdown of the various versions, please visit this link.
In the next article, we will look at the main new features of Word.
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