Oh lawd, is dat sum Office 2010?

Yup, it sure is.

After having used the new Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 (yes, they really gave it that longass name) for a full workday, I feel it is time to give a short summary of it (from my point of view).

Let’s skip the installation part, which went by rather smoothly (except I had to uninstall my existing Office package, as it was 2007 x86, and I just so happen to be sitting on a x64 system).

Word

So Word held the most pleasant surprise so far; support for open source formatting!
That’s right, Microsoft finally got the point, and when you start Word 2010 for the first time, it happily asks you if you would like to optimize Word for use with Microsoft Office, or to go all out and optimize for .odt (which is used by OpenOffice).

I mainly work with Microsoft files at work, so I chose this option (although I do keep OpenOffice installed and up to date on the same machine at all times, as I use open source privately as much as possible).

Outlook

This is where the “WTF” mode starts.
OK, outlook can’t start because the profile isn’t compatible (guess what, the files from my 2007 install is still there!), so I go the long way, along the Mail Setup screen, which decided it wouldn’t let me at my email accounts or data files, as it kept demanding I sign in (which is a bit hard when I can’t sign in as the files are incompatible). After some tugging back and forth, I deleted all the data files manually, watched Outlook scream at me for a little bit about missing files, and then it just “worked”. By this I mean I was allowed to access the list of data files and email accounts and delete them (which made Outlook scream some more as the files I was deleting didn’t exist to begin with now).

Set up my email, attached it to the exchange server, and then I waited. And I waited…and waited some more. After 10 minutes it pops up a box asking me for my password and I enter it, just to wait another ~3 minutes for it to load the actual inbox screen.

I didn’t put much into this, it was a first run, and there were quite a bit of emails to synchronize after all.

Ok, we’re in, mail is synced and all seems good, yes? Wrong.
This is where you start closing the application and open it again, just to watch how fast it really loads up, being all flashy and new after all.
It still takes 3-4 minutes to load outlook, even after the initial syncing…

Ok, enough crying, let’s look at the ups; There’s finally built in support for storing credentials when signing in to exchange, this was a major bother in previous versions like 2007 where you would have to rely on third party software, or obscure and time demanding backdoors to store your credentials.
There’s also the new design, it is much sleeker, more streamlined and isn’t filled with various colors, it’s all pretty stylish and simplistic (that’s a whole lotta fancy words right there!)
The various interfaces such as email, calendars and contacts are much easier to use, with more space for the calendars, a better default organization of various mailboxes, keeping the default ones such as Inbox, Sent Items etc on the top, with a little spacer separating them form custom folders .

Just as I was starting to enjoy the look of it all, the “WTF” continues; Microsoft Office Socializing!
…That’s right…they added social networking to your outlook mail box (Currently only supports LinkedIN and MySpace). This is interesting, by all means, especially with the LinkedIN incorporation, from a corporate point of view, this is an excellent way to keep track of freelancers, outsources and the likes, as well as potential new candidates for hire and so forth. I decided to give this a try, not having signed up for LinkedIN before my self, despite suggestions from friends. I made my self an account, and tried connecting the account, but nothing happened.
I then noticed the need for an external application, you need to download support for these features from the Microsoft website, so I do that. I get the one I wanted (LinkedIN, remember?) , I then proceed to install this, during the installation, it tells me I need to install the extension support for Outlook, and provides me with a nice button to click to go to the download page for this. Another Microsoft site appears, and I download this addon as well. Turns out this is an extension for Outlook 2003/2007 and it’s in beta and won’t accept my Outlook 2010 at all. So I’m not getting anywhere with adding support for social networking like I wanted, as native support in the mail client isn’t supported by the extension applications (yes, that IS confusing!).

I can’t say I use the other Office products as much, so it’s hard to give a representation of my experience from them, but they all follow the same streamlined form as the two aforementioned applications.