Office 2010 Beta
I just downloaded the beta version of Office 2010, and I have to say it’s very impressive. I was running Office 2003 on my development machine and using the 2007 version in the classes I teach at school. I was expecting an extremely long download time. To my surprise, the entire 2MB download took about a minute, and all five programs: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote opened instantly. Apparently, the first download just contains the bare minimum you need to get started, and Office will automatically download the additional features as you use them. Brilliant!
I’ve been using Notepad for my to-do lists, but I started playing around with the Task List feature in Outlook, and I might switch over to that. Outlook also includes an address book and calendar, which will be very useful, especially after I can figure out how to get the web component going so I can log in from anywhere. Apparently that’s possible with Office 2010.