Jul 03,  · Microsoft Office Review. Microsoft Office at Amazon for $ given that Microsoft wants to sell Office, its free web apps don’t offer the same functionality as the paid desktop 4/5. May 08,  · The version of OneNote, now a component of all Office editions, adds some powerful tools, including an improved search function, the ability to turn handwritten math equations into text, and. Microsoft Office – Free Download. Votes. Category Office Suites. Program license Paid. Size GB. Works under: Windows XP. Program available in .
 
 

Microsoft office 2010 review free

 

Trusted Reviews is supported by its audience. If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more. This is especially true if your requirements are relatively basic, or if you prefer to use online applications where you can access your documents from anywhere.

If you want a slightly more digestible idea of what Office entails, we suggest you start there. It helps, of course, that Microsoft has fine-tuned ribbons extensively, while also offering more flexibility so you can customise them to suite your needs. Also of great benefit is the quick access toolbar also customisable in the top left corner, which gives you access to common functions e. Another addition that spans every application in Office is Backstage View.

Particularly beneficial are the printing options, where you can change the page properties, preview the outcomes and execute print jobs all from one screen. Collaboration also brings us neatly onto another new aspect of the Office experience: Office Web Apps. More impressions on the Office Web Apps can be found later in the review. One other important development in the world of Office is the presence of a bit version. For various reasons it does lack one or two features of Office bit and Microsoft recommends most users stick with bit, but what it does bring is a lifting of the file size limitations that might have hampered power users when using Excel or Access.

In time it might bring further benefits. One thing we must deal with before all else is the various versions of Office that go on sale today. As ever they are numerous, but only three of them are available to buy from retailers. These versions, which presume the presence of a trial version of Office already being installed, allow the purchase of a single-use license with no further download.

Suggested retail pricing inc. Happily, the likes of Amazon are already discounting the retail versions to at or around the suggested PKC prices. Unsurprisingly it was one of the applications that were given the Ribbon treatment in Office , and it benefits from many of the best new features of Office as a whole.

Primary among those is Paste Preview, which does away with the irritation often caused when pasting text and images from a document or web page. As the name suggests, it allows you to preview the effects such pasting will have on the formatting of your document, giving you various options to merge, adapt and retain your chosen formatting.

Indeed this previewing ability is pervasive across the whole of Office, so you can always see how a particular piece of formatting will look before you apply it. However, these new features, which include the ability to remove backgrounds, add and preview styles and filters, adjust colours and contrast, and a great deal more, make it easy for users of any ability to embed and tweak photos within a document.

These are joined by significantly enhanced SmartArt, making it all the more easier to create diagrams and flow charts. From there you can drag whole sections of the document around, eliminating the rigmarole of tedious copying and pasting. You can also search the whole document from here, which even in very large documents is instantaneous. Right-clicking each heading also provides a wealth of options, such as the ability to promote or demote headings, and print the heading and its contents in a single-click.

Word also benefits most among the Office applications from Backstage View. There are a number of options here that are incredibly useful, but best of all is the new printing options.

In Backstage View the print dialog neatly combines print preview, printing options and page options into one simple screen, so you can make changes and instantly see how they will impact on your document. These features are in most of the other Office applications, too. This works quite well, though Microsoft has missed a trick in not allowing you to save locally and to the SkyDrive simultaneously.

This necessitates manually saving to either if you want to keep an up-to-date copy in both locations. Though anyone with basic needs will do fine with free alternatives, Word makes an extremely strong case for itself. It has an ease of use and depth of features in an entirely different league to those it nominally competes with, giving those with genuinely demanding requirements more and better executed tools than ever before.

Like Word, Excel was one of the Office applications to benefit from the ribbon interface. As such the transition from it to Excel is nothing like as dramatic. Anyone transitioning from Excel , however, will find Excel a very different beast indeed. This is particularly true of Excel, since it puts at your fingertips so many of the items once buried beneath several menus. Excel also brings a number of performance enhancements. These improvements, when combined with the multi-core enhancements made to the maths engine in Office , give Excel a useful turn of speed and ensure it properly exploits our modern, powerful desktop PCs.

Now all Microsoft need do is put the GPU to some number crunching use, though those in academia and other well-endowed organisations can take advantage of High Performance Computing HPC cluster processing to off-load processing tasks to other PCs. Slicers are rather more powerful and exceedingly useful. Beyond these two headline features there are a few other features worthy of note. You can now record macros for chart elements, while improvements to the functions library see the addition of 50 new functions and greater accuracy overall.

After the complete sea-change of the previous iteration, Excel is simply another step in the road. They are important steps, though, particularly where performance and scalability are concerned. Nonetheless, anything that can make PowerPoint smoother, more stylish and easier to use can only be a good thing, particularly if it means people use it better.

Where the ribbon is particularly effective is in making it easier for novice users to create attractive presentations. There are plenty of themes to get people on their way, while the live preview effects seen throughout Office are present in PowerPoint and prove particularly useful in previewing transitions and animations before applying them.

However, while Keynote can still boast more eye-candy, PowerPoint is no ugly duckling and surges ahead in other areas. Most salient are its video integration features, allowing for embedding of both locally stored videos and videos from online services such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Where PowerPoint really excels, however, is in its numerous options for sharing your efforts. A public service that requires a Windows Live ID, it will produce a link that you can send to people via email. This link will then open in any web browser and display a live version of your presentation, ready for you to proceed. Returning to the topic of video, another way to share your presentations is to convert them to video.

Videos can be outputted at three settings: x for computers and projectors; x for DVDs and online video services; and x for portable media devices. PowerPoint is another success for the Office suite. Video integration is the headline feature, though, while the ability to quickly and easily setup remote presentations and export to video are very welcome. Depending on who you talk to and there was some discussion of this point in the recent podcast , Outlook is either an essential tool for email or the spawn of Satan.

Starting with its ribbon, the standout feature is the Quick Steps box. Elsewhere, the interface, cosmetic differences aside, is very similar to that of Outlook By default your folder view is on the left, with calendars and tasks on the right, and your inbox and preview pane through the middle.

One change in the interface comes in the addition of the People Pane which, when activated, sits below emails. Of all the new features of Outlook , the People Pane is our favourite as it saves a lot of sifting through old emails to find what you need. It also feeds you status updates from social networks, a feature reliant on what Microsoft calls Social Connectors. Social Connectors are plug-ins for social networks, with LinkedIn and MySpace currently available and Facebook and others due later this year.

Once installed they will pull all sorts of information from the networks, including the obvious like status updates but also more useful stuff like contact information and profile photos. This feature has great potential, then, but in its current form it has its limitations. Your local and LinkedIn contacts are kept separate, creating duplications and ultimately not making best use of all that extra information. This approach is understandable to an extent as users would probably complain more if their carefully constructed address book was sullied, but some way of merging this data would be extremely useful and a natural next step.

One addition we have no quibbles with, though, is Calendar Preview. Outlook remains a peerless and extremely powerful email client, but — ribbon interface aside — not all of its new features are resounding successes. Unlike Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which feel close to exactly as intended, Outlook has elements that feel like a work in progress and its HTML rendering should be much better by now.

OneNote is a great application that almost no one uses. Neither is particularly developed though, as the idea with OneNote is to keep things as simple as possible, hence why the ribbon is hidden by default. Probably the most noticeable improvement in OneNote is the addition of a docked view. This is activated via a shortcut on the Quick Access Toolbar, and as the name suggests docks a minimised version of OneNote to the right side of the screen. This effectively acts as the edge of the screen, with active windows automatically re-sized to fit inside it and anything dragged toward it being hidden behind.

This includes pinch to zoom, finger panning — where you can move around a notepad with one finger and draw with the other — and some improved UI controls for touch users. There are numerous editing enhancements, but students who deal with mathematics will be best pleased with the newly added support for equations. OneNote has also become more Wiki-like in operation.

All these additions, and the many other tweaks made to enhance editing and searchability, make OneNote a solid incremental upgrade on the previous version. And interact is very much the buzz word here, because Microsoft has designed Web Apps to be symbiotic with their desktop counterparts. This is both a good and a bad thing — good because it makes sharing documents and information much easier; bad because as a consequence Web Apps lack the depth to stand alone if necessary.

We should probably qualify that last part a bit. If you just want to tap out a basic document and the like, the Web Apps will do their job okay.

However, while not obviously apparent, each one has limitations that make them inferior to the likes of Google Docs and Zoho that we covered in our 5 Best Free Office Alternatives feature. One must only glance at the ribbon in each application to see this, as they are considerably smaller than their desktop counterparts.

Indeed, there are quite a few inconsistencies across the apps, with the PowerPoint Web App being the only one to offer up the enhanced SmartArt options so enjoyed in the desktop application. Other niggles include a lack of support for legacy Office file formats, with only XML-based files. Also, the Open in Word, Excel etc. Despite all these little faults, however, as a version 1. ActiveX limitations aside, browser support is also faultless. In the final reckoning, it delivers handsomely on so many levels and shows that Windows 7 was no fluke.

Microsoft is back on form. That Office is more advanced and comprehensive than any other office suite out there cannot be disputed and Office adds an ease of use previously lacking, but whether its myriad of features are necessary depends on your needs.

If not, carry on as you are.

 

Microsoft office 2010 review free

 
LibreOffice Free. Unfortunately, Word has become such a powerful document-creation tool that its online counterpart is all the more of a letdown.

 
 

Microsoft office 2010 review free. Microsoft Office 2010 review

 
 
Though useful, the reworked File menu or Backstage window may be one of the interface tweaks people have a hard time getting used to, but we think having all these features in one place is much more efficient. Otherwise, we’d hold off for now. Office makes this “view before you commit” functionality available in more than just stylistic changes to your document. Around 7.