AxeSoft

Office 2010 – Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student – Review

As the new fall season approaches its time to start thinking about new productivity software like Office 2010 Hone and Student edition. Office 2010 Home & Student is Microsoft’s latest version of their popular productivity suite. Axesoft recently had a chance to run through Office 2010 and we have to say that we were very impressed by the changes that Microsoft has made. We choose to review Office 2010 because it while Office 2010 Home & Student doesn’t include programs like Visio or InfoPath, it has all of the programs that most user need such as: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. For those unfamiliar with Office, Microsoft Word is the document editing program, Excel is for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for presentations, and OneNote for taking notes. All of the programs included in Microsoft Office 2010 are pretty straightforward and simple. Nowadays, the only program that people are still remain confused about is OneNote – without a doubt one of the most advanced note taking applications in existence.

OneNote allows user to take typed or handwritten notes (for tablets or touchpad users) and match it with embedded photos and videos. OneNote is like the ultimate notebook and should be required software for every college student. Users can even search the text within pictures that are embedded in a OneNote file.

Office 2010 has all of the feature that people have come to love about Microsoft Office over the years –just improved. The new navigation interfaced that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007 known as the ribbon makes its triumphant return, but is now used consistently across a the all of the Office 2010 applications. There is also a new Backstage View for each ribbon that allows users to quickly access common tasks like printing or viewing recent documents. Thankfully, this time around Microsoft has made the ribbon interface user customizable. Not to mention that the entire ribbon interface can navigated using keyboard shortcuts or hidden altogether. Users also have access to more in-depth photo editing control in Word and new animations and transition in PowerPoint.

One of the best features of Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student is that it integrates perfectly with Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free online cloud storage service that allows users to store, download, and edit documents and photos with 25 gigabytes of space. One of the benefits of cloud computing, which we wrote about previously, is that it allows users to access the same file across multiple devices. If you’ve ever fumbled with uploading and downloading documents with Google Docs or Dropbox then you will appreciate Office 2010’s simplified cloud strategy.

Files uploaded to Microsoft’s SkyDrive can be effortlessly accessed by any device from the web or directly from the Office 2010 interface. Documents saved to SkyDrive are instantly available for editing and review online and off including Word documents and PowerPoint presentations by using the free Office Web Apps. As the name implies, the Office Web Apps are browser based implementations of Office programs. Currently, the Office Web Apps collection includes basic versions of OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word. The Web Apps don’t have all of the features of their desktop counterparts but everything that you need to edit a document, which is especially useful if you are working from a device that does not have a Microsoft Office suite installed.

For an added bonus, OneNote files uploaded to SkyDrive are also automatically synced to any linked Windows Phone 7 device. Using OneNote between the Windows Phone 7 and desktop version lets users effortlessly replace third-party note taking applications like Evernote. Microsoft is expected to roll out support for additional file type synching in the future. With all of these features and more, Office 2010 is definitely Microsoft’s best Office suite yet.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student is available at a great price here – Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student (Disc Version)