It’s a love/hate relationship. When Office 2007 came out, you either loved it or hated it. With Office 2010 out now, your hate may soften to accepting the product, and your love will just deepen.

The dismay in Office 2007 centered on the look and feel of the product. The introduction of a new Ribbon, which replaced the standard toolbar in Office 2003, had users grumbling. One was the familiar look that prior Office products held. You could upgrade and the transition was easy.

In Office 2007, Microsoft made a giant leap into the new and unknown, leaving many PC users baffled. The new Ribbon housed a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organized commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The look and feel of the old standby was gone.

Designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible, the Ribbon was either loved or hated. Many gave it a short term shot and went back to using Office 2003.

With Office 2010, Microsoft designed a superior product. Microsoft listened to all the challenges and complaints of users and created a perfect blend. Office 2010 is the best of Office 2003 and Office 2007.

New Features

Those who endured will enjoy a new customizable Ribbon (Users could not customize the Office 2007 Ribbon) so you can organize it according to your needs. A modified Ribbon is now available in all Office applications, and it now includes the “File” option and a new feature called “Backstage View,” giving easy access to task-centered functions such as printing and sharing.

Get excited! Backstage view incorporates the most commonly used actions in one place (no more dialog boxes with tabs). And there’s more! You get the usual open, save and print, and you also get several templates for new documents, print layouts and ways to share your work, all without dialog boxes and tabs, everything is much more easily accessible.

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Additional features include:

• A Paste preview which lets you switch between paste options so you can make sure that your work will be formatted correctly
• Role orientation tailored to employees in “roles” such as research and development professionals, sales persons, and human resources
• A built-in screen capture tool for easy internet copy and paste
• A background removal tool for editing photos and clip art within a document
• SmartArt templates and author permissions so you can create wonderful documents even though you’re not an artist
• New text and image editing effects; making it easy to be the pro
• Live collaboration functions; great for the office
• New animations in PowerPoint 2010; insert videos directly into PowerPoint
• A Social Connector that allows users to write emails while keeping track of their family, friends, and colleagues by viewing status updates and past communication history with the individual

Web Apps

For those who are just buying into the idea of “Cloud Computing,” Microsoft now offers a free web-based version of its Office productivity suite, known as Office Web Apps, which started shortly before Office 2010 was released. Office Web Apps include online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and OneNote. This allows sharing and collaboration of documents and files. It also features user interfaces similar to the desktop version. Office Web Apps were released to Windows Live Skydrive for consumers and SharePoint Workspace for corporations last month. If you are without Office, you may have to download a Trial version or buy Office before using Web Apps.

Which Edition Is Right For You

The home editions:

Home and Student 2010 include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Office Home and Business 2010 adds Outlook to the core apps.

The business editions:

Standard 2010 adds Outlook and Publisher to the core apps.

Professional 2010 adds Outlook, Publisher, and Access.

Professional Plus 2010 includes Outlook, Publisher, Access, SharePoint Workspace, Communicate, and InfoPath.

What are the system requirements?

Office 2010 runs on Windows XP (SP3 required), Windows Vista with SP1 or later (32-bit or 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit or 64-bit) with MSXML 6.0 installed, Windows Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit), and Windows Server 2008 R2. You’ll need at least 3 GB of hard disk space.

So there you have it-the love/hate relationship with Microsoft Office 2010. My opinion, I love it. I’ve been using Office 2007 for three years and found the move to Office 2010 easy. If you hated Office 2007 and went back to Office 2003, give Office 2010 a chance. If you loved Office 2007 you’ll be totally infatuated with Office 2010.

Next month I will delve into the Office suite applications.

Part one of a three-part series

By Cary Warner (Contributed)

Cary Warner is VP of Marketing for Aperio, Information Technology Administrators. He can be reached at 916-568-6830, cwarner@aperio.cc or http://www.aperio.cc

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