Microsoft Office 2010 gone public beta, woohoo~. Received invitation to download the Starter edition, fool around for a little while, I’m quite lovin it.
Well, the ribbon is still there, but it’s not so clustered look, it now giving rather flat and clean feel. I don’t have the new graphic thing in my version, so I’m not so sure about it, but seen it in video before, it’s pretty amazing for a simple photo editing needs. There is also some collaboration features there for paid version, yes, Starter Edition is free! Of course, with little ads here and there, but this article might be exaggerated a bit, from what I’ve seen in the beta, is just a small tiny ads there, you won’t even notice is there if you concentrating on your work, of course, if one would have open Word just to look at the interface, there is no point to get a Word installed. So finger cross for no big changes coming for the ads.
There are few things that in the Starter Edition I quite enjoy is the Print preview, rather than it open up a new windows for the print preview, it is there on the menu, live update while we tweaking the print setting on the left hand side. Plus, since Office auto save for a interval of time, we can easily revert back to certain period of the draft. And my favorite one (beside free), is the portable install, we can install our Office 2010 to a pendrive, for around ~300MB of space, and it works pretty well so far. But it created a Local Disk (Q) drive in My Computer, I’m not sure what is it for and how to remove it yet.
Microsoft bringing free version of SQL Server, Visual Studio, and now Office for people who don’t need those fancy and powerful feature for no cost, and I hope to see more products that will have an alternative free version, hmm..what else could we all use, Windows? nah… they won’t.