First Look at Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

I woke up this morning and found an Office 2010 Technical Preview invitation waiting for me. I could not stop my excitement and quickly downloaded it. Join me in downloading + installing this wonderful product!

Downloading

Like other Microsoft beta products, I had to go through a series of annoying registration process. Seriously, can’t they just get information from my Live Account? That’s how Google does it and has proved working so far.

A lot of products under the big family “Office 2010” are available for download, including Office Professional (incldes Outlook), Visio, SharePoint, InfoPath and a whole lot others.

Then, after selecting the version I want (32 bit or 64 bit), another MS annoying thing appeared – having to install an ActiveX control (yes, that means only IE can download) to download the files I wanted. I thought the one that they used for downloading Windows 7 was nice, so why did they switched again? Grr.

Download was pretty fast and stable at a rate of 400kb/s.

Installing

The installing interface wasn’t that different from the one of Office 2007. Except, the background is maybe darker than the previous one.

Oh wait, wow, there is an upgrade option!

But of course, I still wanted my Office 2007, so I will do a clean install this time.

The installing process took about 20 mins on my Athlon TK-53 1.6Gx2 + 2GB Ram laptop. Acceptable. After the installation, a reboot was necessary.

Using

Right after reboot, two icons showed up:

When I thought I got a virus or something, I found out that they are part of the Technical Preview. It is a little bug report feature, I guess. How effective is it? Not sure.

The Splash Screen shocked me. The colors at the bottom is animated, and it is much more than just an image.

Honestly, the interface isn’t that much of a change, other than the whole color scheme has changed from blue to grey. 3 Color schemes are included, like Office 2007, and they are light grey, grey, and dark grey.

The biggest change lies in the “Dashboard” (or is there a name for it?) When you click the Blue button next to “Home” on the ribbon, a dark background “dashboard” thing comes out (no longer a dropdown menu). Options are same as those in Office 2007 when you press the same button, but in a much cooler interface

For example, when you print a page, you no longer have to open another window to set the print options:

I figured out I really like this feature. Some options, like “Options” and “Open” and “Save”, however still requires opening a separate window. If I can choose the file I want to open within the Dashboard, it will be much easier to use.

Conclusion

Although there are only a few surprises, they sure are really good surprises. I have yet to test other Office products, so stay tuned for a full review of the Office 2010 Technical Preview!