Office 2010 Beta Download

The most craving Wordprocessor is finally here for Public testing.

Microsoft today, on Day 2 of PDC09, has release Office 2010 Beta to public via Microsoft Download Center.

It’s now open to generic public for testing and providing feedback to Microsoft. The Office 2010 will, however, go RTM in next year.

Download Office 2010 Beta 32bit/64bit
Download Office Web Applications Server 2010 Beta 64bit

Brief Review:

First noticeable thing is that performance has improved a lot compared to Office 2007, just as with Windows 7.
Image Editing and Management

This is a new utility included in Word to make screenshots. It works in a way very similar to the “cuts” already included in Windows to begin using Word is minimized and let us select the desktop area to capture. But it comes with an interesting advantage, by taken screenshot is saved in the gallery, regardless of whether the use or not, and stays there even after closing Word without saving changes. Thus it is easy to find an image within this “Gallery captures” for inclusion in a document.

It has incorporated several tools to make a simple image editing in Word. For example, applying artistic effects to images can be very interesting .
Interface improvements

Something we can see that Microsoft has done is to create a consistent appearance for all applications. They have eliminated all traces of the interface for Office 2003 (except for minor utilities, such as Picture Manager, or the gallery, which follow exactly the same), and the Ribbon has been implemented in all applications of the suite.

Button behavior on MS Word

Office Button in Outlook allows us to perform tasks with few clicks in Office 2007/2003 which required a huge amount of navigating menus and dialog boxes, such as adding a new email account or set up automatic responses. Also, thanks to the implementation of the Ribbon, the Outlook interface is much easier to customize according to our needs.
Other New Features

Translation Tool now comes pre-installed (and before we could only use them after you have installed an add-on for Windows Live Translator), new SmartArt templates that have been added, and new animations and transitions in PowerPoint. In addition, we have Word 2010 that allows us to save files directly to SharePoint sites, and there is native support for open and save documents in ODF format, along with the ability to export documents to PDF .

Protected Mode – Security feature that works every time you open a document downloaded from Internet. What it does is lock the file so that we can not do any work without first edition we have explicitly allowed (something similar to what Windows Vista / 7 with the files you have downloaded from the web).

So, try out the new Beta and if you know of any more features or discover something yourself then please share it us via comments.