Today, I installed Office 2010 Professional Plus.

I took the upgrade path when I ran the setup.  I previously had Office 2007 installed on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 bit edition.

Besides the install taking quite a long time (most likely because I was writing this blog post during the upgrade), I am very impressed with how responsive this version of Office is vs. the prior release.  Applications just snap open, and I mean literally SNAP – 1 second and Microsoft Access opens!  On top of that, the other improvement I welcome is the destruction of the little round circle in the upper left-hand corner of all applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) called “The Office Button”.  Whose idea was that anyway?  I have had several of my clients complain that they thought this was just decoration and there for the fun of it.  Microsoft is clearly taking feedback into account on this one…they have replaced it with the good old, traditional “File” menu which leads to a host of options about the application you were working on that you otherwise could not normally find:

Outlook2010Ribbon

The other major change I noticed was that every application now has the ribbon interface.  Clearly Microsoft was going for consistency.  Outlook is the most obvious example with this change.

With this change, Outlook obviously also received the major overhaul.  There is tight integration with social networking.  Microsoft provided the capability to integrate Outlook with your professional blogs, Windows Live, FaceBook and other social networking services.  Given that this is the application that the majority of the business world leaves running all day long, running their day through Outlook email, calendar, and tasks…does this mean they’ll be having a bit of fun at work?

And finally, a small geeky point that made my day…I was very happy to note that my Access database I use for keeping track of my client records opened up and worked just fine in Access 2010.  The database was originally created in Access 2003.  I had upgraded it to 2007 and it still keeps on ticking.

I’ll add more articles on Office 2010 as I use it more frequently.  Thanks for reading!