Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

Microsoft has announced recently that the next major release of their Microsoft Office suite of applications is named 2010 and expected to be released for a Technical Preview (Beta) by July 2009. The last major release MS Office 2007 is actually Version 12. However, the Office 2010 is versioned as 14. This is probably because of the common belief on number 13.

Microsoft created a website called Office2010themovie.com based on Blockbuster Movie designs.

They mentioned that the Technical Preview will be available to general public until July 2010. However, the Office 2010 Technical Preview applications will start automatically shutting down after 2 hours of use starting from March 2010.

Though the official version of Technical Preview is not expected until July 2009, Torrent sites has already released the version and is quite popular because of the increasing number of downloads.

The major change in the new Office 2010 is that it is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors (something that should’ve happened long before). The next major thing I noticed is that the design has gone under a major rework based on Office 2007 theme. They also introduced new themes for Office Suites (however, only default theme is available in Technical Preview). The screen shots so far leaked are amazing and I tried the 64 bit version of Office 2010 in my Vista PC and was awesome by its beauty. Major rework has gone on many applications in terms of functionality. The ribbon from Office 2007 is now available in all the applications (Office 2007 does not show ribbon in some applications like Outlook to make them feel compatible with Office 2003). Instead of the round button that showed Start Menu in Office 2007, it is now a rectangle button which shows a different screen for all menu operations and allows you to go back to work area. All office suites are following their official color schemes throughout the Menus. The performance is slow but acceptable due to its beauty. Unusual introduction is Minimize, Close and Cancel links in Splash screens.