Office 2010 nearly ready; upgrade offer launched

Microsoft said on Friday that it plans to finalize the code for Office 2010 next month and, as expected, it kicked off a program enabling those who buy Office 2007 in the coming months to get a free upgrade to the new version.

In a blog posting, Microsoft said that it will have a business launch for the Office 2010 products on May 12. The company has said it expects the software to be broadly available in June.

As for the technology guarantee program, Microsoft says it will apply to those who buy Office 2007 between now and September 30 and will allow an upgrade to the comparable Office 2010 product.

Though such programs are typical, this one had even less of an element of surprise after a Microsoft employee briefly posted details of the program last month. Microsoft CFO Peter Klein confirmed the program earlier this week, telling financial analysts on Tuesday to expect the company to defer revenue this quarter to next to account for the upgrades.

Although Office 2010 doesn't bring a radically different look or new file formats, as Office 2007 did, it introduces a number of changes, most significantly the addition of companion Office Web apps that work in a browser. Also, for the first time, Office will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

A beta version of the software has been available since November and Microsoft has also been doing limited testing of a near-final "release candidate" version of the software.

[myles taylor]

I hope that 2011 is coming soon as well. If they could make it work faster and smoother rather than other things, I'd be really impressed.

[Mr. Dee]

Mac BU folks said it should be ready be the end of this year. You will also be getting an equivalent to Outlook, so you should be pleased about that, along with SharePoint Integration.

[Mr. Dee]

I personally am not pleased with the migration strategy from Office 2007 32 to Office 2010 64 bit. I have all the Office Family of products installed on my system, from Word to Project, Visio etc, and its annoying that I can't even have a mix of 2007 and 2010 projects installed. Uninstalling the products take a very, very long time, not to mention installing them. I have the 2010 beta currently installed, so if I do get the final, I will have to do a lot of uninstalling, (which is understandable considering its beta). But there should have been a more automated upgrade strategy for those who want to move from 32 to 64 bit. I don't see how hard it is to make the installer uninstall 32 bit Office 2007 or 2003 from Program Files x86 folder and put Office 2010 64 bit in the Program Files and make a combination of both exist, since you have 32 and 64 bit programs that co-exist just fine in Windows 7 64 bit.

[RompStar_420]

Is there a magic button I can press to get all my menus back like in 2003 ? I hate ribbons! Refuse to upgrade, I hate it!

[dhavleak]

Whatever.

[techman21]

There is a company that makes a toolbar plugin so you'll get a tab that mimics the old 2003 toolbar and menus. I haven't tried it myself. Better to learn the new layout, since it's not going away.

[Renegade Knight]

@ techman21

Newer doesn't mean better. I have handy document that tells me how to force some annoying formatting improvments in 2007 to work like 2003 so I can spend more time working and less time formatting.

A round hammer head may have a use but it won't make a better nail driver.

[monkeyfun14]

Don't then.

No one has a gun to your head. Good luck maintaining a job with that attitude.

[fudbuster77]

@Rompstar_420:


I'm with you! I completely understand and agree with you. I'm also against this new fangled 'electricity' and 'indoor plumbing' too. Why does technology have to mess up a perfectly good outhouse? I mean really, progress just gets in the way. Nothing good will come of it, I swear!

[Ntrenka]

It's not that hard to learn the new layout (actually it's been more than 3 years since 2007!) It takes time. But like techman21 said there is a small add-in called ubitmenu (http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/ ) and all it does is insert a tab that has basically the same layout of 2003.

[mailbox001]

Will going Office 64-bit make Outlook less of a resource hog? I currently use Win7 64bit & Office 2007 with my HP Firebird and is capable of running muliptle programs without any lag. But Outlook is always the largest resource hog. Each day I have to close out Outlook so it can correctly sync with Exchange to get me email.

[Mr. Dee]

I personally don't see it, although I am seeing the beta, but downloading e-mail from Hotmail brought the program to a halt when I was using it. Maybe we will see a difference in the RTM. Running on a system with 4 GBs of RAM (Outlook 2010 beta 64 bit).

[heytommy]

Do you ever clean out your inbox? Or do you have tens of GBs in attachments that Outlook has to deal with all day?

[Knightro2]

Ha! Well I know my employer won't be going to this anytime soon. We just completed the roll-out of 2007 to our 8000+ machines late last year. Amazingly we are already moving along pretty quickly to get all the laptops upgraded from XP to 7 by Q3.

[Blaketallos]

Wow, sweet. I'll have to wait for the full product to be released.

[IvannaKnow]

Will Office 2010 offer off-line activation?

[Mr. Dee]

Yes, just like previous versions, just follow the instructions in the activation wizard to call the Microsoft Activation Center.

[Jack_Smith56]

So do I get a free upgrade to Office 2010 If I already have Office 2007?

[heytommy]

No, its for new office 2007 purchases during the time period listed above.

[heytommy]

I've been using the Beta for awhile now. I like it. It's really not much different than Office 2007. It took awhile to get used to the ribbon in Outlook. And at first, I really liked the "conversation" feature in Outlook that kept all messages in a thread together, but I had to turn it off, because it oddly made things harder to find. When searching, it would display the thread, not the individual email I was looking for. And then you'd have to find the email in the thread. Still needs work there.

Oh, and you can finally print ranges of pages in Outlook instead of just even/odd pages.

I haven't really noticed anything in Word or Excel that changed my life yet.

[boe_d]

I agree about the message threading. It would group the wrong things and make it frustrating to track - search is much better for that purpose.

[boe_d]

I like Office 2010. It now handles 3 full exchange accounts in Outlook. It would be great if it handled at least 2 more but that is a tremendous step forward I've been waiting for since Office 2003.

Outlook does crash but it is beta so I can understand that.

Word, Excel etc can take a while to open - even on a very fast fresh install 3GHz Core 2 with 8GB of memory on Win 7 x64 - hopefully that is beta code for logging but I was told that with vista and the final vista was slower than the beta.

Customizing toolbars is a welcome return for many of their clients - foolish for them to have removed it.

Hopefully now that Office 2010 handles multiple full Exchange clients (not pop or imap limited) they'll consider the same for Windows Mobile 7/ WIndows 7 series.

[boe_d]

I am concerned they didn't have a second beta considering that Office 2010 isn't completely stable and has performance issues.

[ronaldsauve]

I own 2007 Home and Student. If I upgrade to 2007 Pro, will that qualify me for the upgrade to 2010? Am I correct that we cannot upgrade from 2003?
I really like 2010 Beta, and have been using it since November on 2 computers.

[deepen05]

should be up on torrents in May.. i'm using the beta version right now and its great..

[halfpnt_36]

Free upgrade if you purchase between now and September whatever.... that sucks!!! I just purchased Office 2007 for school on April 14. I'm one week or even less out of that proposed free upgrade timespan. Is that fair or what?????????????????