Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 > Reviews (3)

Let’s get things straight in terms application content:

1. Office Home and Student (I have already reviewed it)
Price: £93
Word, Excel, Power Point and One Note

2. Home and Business
Price £174
Plus Outlook

3. Office 2010 Professional
Price: £311
Plus Access, Outlook, Publisher, SharePoint Workspace, InfoPath Designer.

Warning:

Be very sure about the requirement of the suit since there is no upgrade choice available, meaning thereby it is not possible to upgrade from the Home and Student Edition to say the Professional Edition.

I would say till Office 2003, or even till Office 2007 it was pretty simple software. The Office Suits are generally pricey and it must be justified for people to buy it. Google has come up with excellent online word processing tools and spreadsheets, or even just go to www.office.org- and get open office for yourself - all these for no expense. In order to nullify the inroads that Google and Office.org was making Mocrosoft had to find a way to make Office Suit remain at the top of the list. It is to Microsoft’s credit, they have done that job eloquently with the release of Office 2010 suit.

It must be accepted if there are 100 users of Office Suit, only a handful know the proper use of this excellent software. With the arrival of Office Suit 2010 things are becoming more complicated in a sense that you need spent more time with it to be acquainted with the nuances of Office 2010. What I mean is Office Suit had never been anything difficult to learn but one needs to apply himself to extract the correct potential of this software.

I want to stress the fact that Office Suit 2010 is not an upgrade, which make things difficult but actually it is here to make things even simpler provided one is prepared to sit with it.

I wonder how many people use the Macro tool. When properly applied and programmed it works like magic, you can perform a solid one hour job in just a few seconds. Just think of a situation where you want similar formatting of 100 pages, like same font face, same font size, same font color, similar paragraph spacing and similar indentation. Things become even more difficult if these requirements are a for a file which has already been created. With Office Suit it is just a matter of creating a correct macro and run it on all of 100 pages of 100 different files, things will fit the requirement in just a few clicks, that’s the power of the Office Suit.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

It is always recommended to read very carefully the system requirements while installing any software, not only does it save a lot of embarrassments but also serious configuration and registry problems are avoided. Any application software, to be more explicit any software for that matter has certain hardware requirements for its installation. It becomes even trickier when the software installs but it doesn’t work properly, giving wrong and confusing messages.

The system requirements for Office Home and Student are similar to that of Office Home and Business 2010. Although a RAM of 256 MB is enough, I would advise to upgrade your RAM to 512 MB to have all the apps of Office Home and Student 2010 run to your satisfaction.

Just to recap:

Minimum RAM: 256MB
Preferred: RAM 512 MB
OS: Windows XP (Sp 3) (32-bit) /Windows 7

Set Up:

The setup is very simple and fast, should be complete in less than 20 minutes. I insist on the customization option while running the set up. When you customize the set you are aware what all parts of the software are installed. (Picture 00)

While running set up you might chose the option of not removing the previous version(s) of Office Suite like 2003 and 2007. I think it will be a good idea to keep the 2003 version since this new edition of Office Suit requires serious ‘getting used’ and while getting used to this version the 2003 version will come to a great help, because apparently the menus in Office Home and Student 2010 might look absolutely different yet if you take the cue they have lot of similarities but vary in its appearance to a large extent. I will get into the similarities so that the process of migration to the world of the new office suit becomes that much easier.

A WORD OR TWO ABOUT RIBBON:

Ribbon is basically user required commands, meaning only those commands which are required for a particular task are logically organized in groups under tabs so that the user is not clustered with commands having no relation to the task being performed.(Picture Three)

For example when tables are inserted, the moment you are inside the table a cluster of two commands will appear under ‘Table tools’ tab forming a cluster of two commands ‘design’ and ‘layout’, click them all other necessary commands will appear (Picture Four). Similarly when a picture is selected, the ‘picture tool’ tab appears click ‘format’ under the picture tool tab all the commands required to format picture appears (picture five)

Always keep the Ribbon minimized
1. Click Customize Quick Access Toolbar .
2. In the list, click Minimize the Ribbon.
3. To use the Ribbon while it is minimized, click the tab you want to use, and then click the option or command you want to use. For example, with the Ribbon minimized, you can select text in your Microsoft Office Word document, click the Home tab, and then in the Font group, click the size of the text you want. After you click the text size you want, the Ribbon goes back to being minimized.
Keep the Ribbon minimized for a short time
• To quickly minimize the Ribbon, double-click the name of the active tab. Double-click a tab again to restore the Ribbon.
Keyboard shortcut To minimize or restore the Ribbon, press CTRL+F1.
Restore the Ribbon
1. Click Customize Quick Access Toolbar .
In the list, click Minimize the Ribbon.

(From Always keep the…. Till Minimize Ribbon has been copied from: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/u​se-the-ribbon-HA010089895.aspx?CTT=5&ori​gin=HA010338087)

The most marked change has come in the file menu, click on the file menu and you will be taken to a full page document management section known as the Back stage where you will get the new, save, open…..options with the addition of capabilities like setting up permission to lock changes, pass word protected document encryption, access restriction and invisible digital signature.

(Picture Two)

On the right hand column of the Backstage all the information including editing time, file size, word count etc. are available at a glance.

In the Backstage it is possible to set the compatibility issue. The Word 2010 docs can be saved to be compatible with any version of the office suit. But this becomes a bit tricky while saving PowerPoint presentations in compatibility mode.

Pull-down Style Galleries are very useful to alter styles, colors and fonts. The incorporation of mouse over technology is a big plus of Office 2010. In Word 2010 just mouse over the fonts and you instantly know how the document will look like with a specific font face. Also in Word 2010, once you've copied information elsewhere, you can quickly mouse over the paste preview tools to see how the content will appear using formatting from the source, merged formatting, or how it will look with the source formatting taken out.

A word about those who are scared by the new menu in Office 2010, while looking at the new layout of the Office 2010 menu try to remember the drop down menus of 2003. Keep your eyes on the fly outs situated at the bottom right hand corner of each cluster. Like in the Home menu the second cluster is font, click on the fly-out arrow you get the good old ‘Format Font’ dialogue box. I feel the new lay out is very intelligently created and once you get the feel, you will realize working with Office Suits had never been so bloody simple.

One thing that I want to add here is I am really not fond of using templates which are there aplenty in Word 2010 since I believe they give my documents a global or forgone look which may be used by so many users all over the world. I would rather create my own formatting or template like customized designer dress, which has your own trade mark, but then there are wonderful templates which one can jolly well use but of course that is at the cost of singularity.

EXCEL:

Excel remains as useful as ever with some smart incorporation like color-coded spreadsheets, capability to move through the tabs to access formulae, insert diagrams and charts, a brand new feature called the Sparkline giving you the capability of creating a tine chart in a single cell.(Picture Six)

POWER POINT:

The highlight being the video editing tools, now videos can be edited right within the program can add video effects and also create trigger points to launch animations during presentations. A lovely feature is the ‘Broadcast Slide Show’ option.(Picture Seven) Just click on this option from the Share & Send option of PowerPoint, e-mail the URL to your target(s). What they have to do is just click on the URL.

Caution:

More often than not Power Point 2010 has serious problems if you PDF writers are installed in your machine, in fact it might not just launch at all. Please take care to disable such programs.

Value For Money:

Definitely very pricey but then every good thing has its own price.