Google Docs Vs Microsoft Office 2010? The Debate Continues... - Computers

After many months of beta testing, Microsoft Office 2010 is finally on our shelves. The key question is, how does it measure up? With free applications like Google Docs and OpenOffice - and free versions of the Microsoft Office web applications themselves - what benefits do you get from Office 2010, and is it worth the potential time and expense to upgrade? According to Microsoft, the focus of this major update was on three things: to make work flow more efficient; to effectively use Web applications to make your work available anywhere; and to make collaboration with others much easier, via Microsoft's new "SkyDrive" (25GB of free online storage).

In this brief review we take a look at a few of the more interesting changes and new features product by product, and give our final verdict on the suite as a whole.

Revamped Ribbon

The first, and for some, most significant major change relates to the controversial "Ribbon" (a set of icons that replaces the traditional menus and submenu structures of Office 2003). Thankfully, Office 2010 addresses the biggest problems with the previous Ribbon interface - by letting you customise the Ribbon fully, moving, adding and removing icons or creating your own custom Ribbon with the commands and options you use most frequently. This is a huge improvement over Office 2007, and should give confidence to Office users that have up until now resisted the migration to Ribbon-based interface.

Outlook

The new "Quick Steps" feature in Outlook will speed up dealing with repetitive e-mail tasks. For example, a simple Quick Step can be set-up to move read messages from your inbox into the folder you use the most. You can even set-up macros to string together frequently used combinations of actions.

Hitting the "Ignore" button on long-running conversations will also save you time by hiding all further messages relating to a thread you are not interested in - for example a company event that you don't plan to attend.

The improved "Conversation View" puts messages into threads and is a big improvement on Outlook's previous attempts to show the structure of back-and-forth messages. It also has the ability to pull in messages relating to the thread from mails you have already filed and that are not still in your inbox - a very useful feature that works well.

Excel

If you use Excel for real calculations you will be pleased to know that the statistical, mathematical and financial functions have been overhauled. There are over 50 new functions available, and a number of the existing functions have been renamed to make the purpose of the function clearer.

Pivot tables and charts have also been improved. If you want to switch between different settings in a Pivot Table or Pivot Chart often, you can create what are known as "Slicers" - graphical views that hover over the workbook and combine data from multiple underlying tables or charts that you can style the way you want.

Excel feels generally faster to use; files open and save faster, large workbooks with multiple sheets load in parallel and charts in particular are faster.

PowerPoint

One of our favourite new PowerPoint feature has got to be PowerPoint Broadcast - a quick and easy way of giving a presentation to people who aren't in the same place as you. Simply select the applicable option in the Share & Send section of the PowerPoint menu and you get a URL you can email around to colleagues and clients. Furthermore, your presentation participants don't need to install anything on their machines to view. This is particularly useful for larger presentations where the file size can often mean sending the presentation via e-mail is impractical. You can also turn your presentation into a video - including narration - in full resolution or resized for the web or mobile phone.

The new image editing tools in Office 2010 are particularly useful in PowerPoint, but you also get basic but useful video editing tools. You can trim videos within your presentation by dragging a slider, add fades and other effects like reflections and 3D bevels and bookmark scenes to use for a video menu.

Word

Most of the new features on Word relate to improvements in visual content; new themes, the replacement of the tired "WordArt" feature, and improvements to photo insertion and manipulation.

In particular we liked the new collaboration tools - you can edit a document at the same time as someone else as long as it's stored on SkyDrive - and it's easy to save documents straight there from the desktop menu. This also allows more than one user to edit a document at the same time - with other people's changes clearly highlighted.

Microsoft Office 2010: Verdict

Office 2010 has plenty of new features that just make it easier to get things done. Office 2010 is also the first version of Office with 64-bit versions of the apps; that means you can work with Excel spreadsheets that are larger than 2GB, speed through long documents in Word and handle much larger email stores in Outlook. It is a worthy upgrade for businesses and individual users who need professional-level productivity apps, but for some, it will take some time to get acclimated with the new interface. Those looking for bare-bones, easy-to-use office software should stick with Google's and other online offerings or continue using older Office versions they have already mastered. But if you are eager to try out new time-saving features and are willing to spend some time learning where everything is, we think you will appreciate this major update.

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