One moment, please.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus for Windows for free. The new version of the famous suite, with more features than ever. We reviewed Office Professional, which costs a substantial $ This suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher. Laptop Mag Verdict Compelling new features like a customizable ribbon, better image manipulation, video editing, and the ability to share.
 
 

Microsoft office professional plus 2010 review free. Microsoft Office 2010

They have fewer features than the desktop apps, but they mean you can view and edit Office documents on any machine, you can use them to co-author documents online, and you can keep a OneNote notebook online and work on it in the desktop OneNote app at the same time as a friend or colleague. RIBBON: All the Office apps now have the ribbon interface and an updated version of the Office menu called Backstage, but opened from a tab marked File because that’s what people look for.

Whichever version of Office you get, you’re getting something you didn’t get before: OneNote and the web apps in all the versions, Publisher in the Professional version.

RIBBON: Create your own tabs on the ribbon, add tools and pick an icon to use for the dropdown if there isn’t enough space to show all the icons individually. There’s also a cheaper academic version of Office Professional, but the best way for most people to save money is to get the Home and Student version – or instead of paying for the box and the media, buy a product keycard with the licence number to unlock a pre-installed copy of Office Starter on a new PC.

It doesn’t have the References, Review and View tabs on the ribbon, it lets you edit tables of contents and smart art that’s already in a document but it doesn’t let you create them from scratch and you can’t create pivot tables in Excel. It does have task panes – and it always has a little ad for Office in the corner.

It’s very much a replacement for Works – or for WordPad – and if you want the full new feature set of Office then you want one of the full versions. The question is, with free apps like OpenOffice, free online apps like Google Docs – and the free Office web apps themselves – what do you get from Office , and do you want it? Current page: Microsoft Office Overview. She’s used every version of Windows and Office released, and every smartphone too, but she’s still looking for the perfect tablet.

We review products independently , but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Microsoft has put the final touches on Office , and corporate customers can either buy it via resellers or download a day free trial via TechNet as of May 12 the boxed, retail versions hit shelves in June.

As with many revisions of popular applications, one vital question must be asked: Do you need the new version? Our Office review shows that the latest version packs in enough new conveniences and performance tweaks that you’ll probably at least want Office —something that hasn’t been true of every Office upgrade. Three categories of users should regard Office as an essential upgrade: anyone who creates graphically rich documents and presentations; anyone who buys software for a whole corporation especially if that business relies on collaboration and sharing tools ; and anyone in need of the new bit compatibility which enables users to create worksheets even more humongous than bit Excel’s 2GB limit.

Other, higher-priced editions for corporate and enterprise use include tools for working with SharePoint servers and other collaboration tools. For the first time, Microsoft doesn’t offer upgrade pricing on any Office edition; you’ll need to buy either a full copy or a “Product Key Card” which gives an activation key no DVD or packaging used to unlock a trial version of Office Product Key Cards have street prices typically about two-thirds the price of the boxed versions.

That’s not to say there are no free upgrades; if you bought Office on or after March 5, , you qualify for a free upgrade to Office Of course, you don’t have to pay at all for Office-like functionality.

Open-source darling OpenOffice. Sadly, however, it’s got a clunky interface and generally lacks the polish of the last couple revisions of Microsoft Office. If you’re not a power user who does tons of formatting of word docs and don’t tend to put a serious strain on Excel, you might consider Google Docs Free, , which is free for personal use and still pretty cheap for business.

Of course, free is a relative term; some businesses might find that the process of making the switch can be costly in terms of disruptions of workflow during the transfer. And then there’s the issue of keeping your documents in the cloud, which isn’t for everyone. Enhanced Not Transformed Interface Unlike Office , which introduced a brand-new Ribbon interface that proved controversial among consumers, lacks a steep learning curve. By now, users who took the plunge feel at home with the Ribbon.

Office improves on the Ribbon by adding an option to create custom tabs that contain only the tools you use most often. It’s still not perfect, because Microsoft only lets you choose from a small set of built-in icons for commands that you add to the ribbon—ancient pre-Ribbon versions of Office let you choose your own icons when you added commands to a toolbar. I am, however, grateful for the option to export my Ribbon customizations, so that I can import them on other systems without building them again from scratch.

In Office , few users discovered they could hide the ribbon by clicking in it, or pressing Ctrl-F1. The Office ribbon sports an arrow icon that reminds you to click on it to turn the ribbon on or off. As in the version, if you tap the Alt key in , the Ribbon displays little boxed letters you can type to perform tasks entirely from the keyboard. I was impressed to see that Microsoft added new keyboard shortcuts to perform tasks that required the mouse in Some features, however, such as paragraph styles, still require too much mousing.

Office nixes the pearl in favor of the File tab and introduces a “Backstage” view that puts all the standard File menu functions and more on a spacious menu, complete with print preview. I spend a lot of time printing, managing, and sharing documents, and the new Backstage view makes me wonder how I managed without it for so many years.

Still, it provided some frustration. Initially, Backstage appeared to lack a feature present in every earlier version of Office that would let me open my recently used documents by typing Alt-F and then pressing either 1 for the most-recently used file, or 2 for the second most-recently used, and so on.

In the new version, these keystrokes won’t do anything at all until you open the “Recent” view on the Backstage page and add a check mark next to an option buried near the foot of the page that says “Quickly access this number of Recent Documents,” followed by a box where you can enter the number you want to see. A lot of keyboard-savvy users will be frustrated until they find this option. When Office came out, Microsoft expected you to download an add-in if you wanted to export files to PDF.

The new version builds in PDF export from the start. Unfortunately, Word still doesn’t supply a built-in redaction content-hiding tool of the kind that security-conscious users have wanted for years.

Microsoft makes redaction possible through a downloadable tool that isn’t officially “supported,” which means they don’t promise it will work. I’m glad the feature is there, but it’s not the most confidence-inspiring way to offer a crucial security feature. Download the tool at redaction. Microsoft keeps promising that you’ll be able to share and edit documents in a browser using the new Office Web Apps using either a SharePoint server for businesses or the free Windows Live service for everyone else , but the Web Apps haven’t yet been released.

We’ll follow up with a full report when we’ve had a chance to give them a thorough testing. PowerPoint gets a nifty video-editing tool that lets me drag a timeline to trim a video to the exact length I want to display on a slide. It also gets Microsoft’s new equation editor, which provides some of the most elegant mathematical typography on the planet. This advanced mathematical typography was introduced in Word , and now is available in both Word and PowerPoint.

My favorite graphical improvement, however, is the background-removal tool, which saves the foreground object in a photo while removing everything else. It starts out by making a best-guess of what parts of an image you want to keep, and displays the rest with garish purple shading.

In my tests, this initial guess never selected exactly the parts I wanted to save, but it took me all of ten seconds to figure out how to click on regions of the image to add or remove blocks of color from part I wanted to preserve.

Cropping and other image adjustments are now finally as easy as they are on a Mac, with easy mouse-dragging actions for zooming into an image. Microsoft also built in a full range of “artistic” effects like glow and bevel. Word and Publisher now support advanced OpenType typographic features such as “swash” and “linked letters”, as well as different “stylistic sets” for subtly changing the look of a document—features only available on the Windows platform within Adobe’s Creative Suite the Mac OS has had these features built-in for years.

For most users, the main advantage of OpenType support is the ability to use more-readable “lowercase” numerals with “2” the same height as a lower-case “e” and “6” the same height as an upper-case “E” instead of the typewriter-style numerals required by spreadsheets.

Unfortunately, Microsoft supports this powerful feature with a minimal, unhelpful interface buried in the Font dialog. I hope third-party vendors can fill the interface gap. Not all the surprises are pleasant. The new version moves printing options to the spacious new Backstage menu, but I’m dismayed to see that Outlook’s version of Backstage hides or omits options that are front and center in all other Office apps.

For example, if you want to print only one page in a Word document, a prominent button on Word’s Backstage menu lets you choose between printing all pages or individual pages. But you won’t find that button in Outlook’s Backstage menu–instead, you need to click on a tiny “Print options” button that opens yet another menu where you enter the number of the page that you want to print.

Typically, I only want to print out the top few paragraphs of a message, and not a dozen or more pages of earlier replies, but Outlook makes me use two dialog boxes to achieve this simple task instead of one.

If you’ve been bothered for years by Outlook’s slightly sluggish response to the keyboard when you create a message, you’ll notice some improvement though there’s still room for improvements in responsiveness. A new Quick Steps feature automatically performs multiple operations with a single click, and you can add to the supplied Quick Steps by creating your own.

For example, one click on a QuickStep button can launch a reply to the currently selected message and also delete the message or file it in a storage folder.

A powerful new feature lets you search in Outlook for your contacts on LinkedIn and—eventually—other social networking services. It’s handy, but getting it up and running was troublesome; I had to bang my forehead on the desk a few times before I figured out that I needed to download and install software from LinkedIn’s site before I could make it work.

Surely Microsoft could have given me a link to click to smooth my way. I rely on add-ins to warn me when I reply to “all” rather than to the sender, so I don’t tell the world something that I want to tell only one person.

A new MailTips feature in Outlook now provides that kind of warning—but only if I get my mail from an Exchange server. Like almost everything else in Office , Outlook towers over the competition, at least on the Windows platform. It’s more powerful and feature-rich, than anything else—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best mail client and contact manager for your individual purposes.

If you’re willing to trust your data to the cloud, you may choose to use Gmail and Google’s Calendar and Contacts instead of a client on your computer; I’ve seen too many people get stung by outages and hijacked accounts to go that route for any data I value.