Julie Sartain of PC World gives us Five Reasons You Don't Need Microsoft Office 2010, and she doesn't hold back:
(1) No more upgrades. If you are looking for an upgrade price, forget it. Microsoft has decided not to offer upgrade pricing anymore.
Next to Windows Millennium, Vista, the Office 2007 Ribbon, and the Kin bombshell, this is the worst marketing decision Microsoft has ever made.
(2) Free Alternative Programs. OpenOffice, et al.
Other alternative programs include IBM's Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and Zoho--all free--and ThinkFree, which has both a free and a fee-based version.
(3) Few New Features, Nothing Impressive. You can save Word docs to SharePoint--or just copy and paste them in. Other new features include paste preview, so you can preview the page before you paste items into your document--or you could just go ahead and paste the items in, then select undo if you don't like how it looks.
There are a few other minor features. However, I still don't think these are anything to get excited about, and they're certainly not worth the new ‘non-upgradable' price tag.
(4) The Ribbon Changed, but It's Still a Bomb. The only real change worth mentioning on the Ribbon bar is its capability to customize the menus.
I hated it in Office 2007 and I still hate it. After using it for weeks and cursing it daily, I finally purchased a program from AddIn Tools that, when installed, redesigns the Ribbon bar menus back to the old Office 2003 menus.
(5) Simultaneous Editing. [This] is nothing more than a shared document feature.
This not a cool function. It actually creates a lot more confusion than it's worth, especially if you have ever used Adobe Acrobat to perform these same tasks. Every time I have ever used sharing and collaboration in Acrobat, it has resulted in chaos with one user changing what another just wrote or edited causing conflict between all participants because the original is no longer available unless someone had the foresight to make a backup copy.
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I was with her until she suggested Corel's WordPerfect. Really?!
(1) No more upgrades. If you are looking for an upgrade price, forget it. Microsoft has decided not to offer upgrade pricing anymore.
Next to Windows Millennium, Vista, the Office 2007 Ribbon, and the Kin bombshell, this is the worst marketing decision Microsoft has ever made.
(2) Free Alternative Programs. OpenOffice, et al.
Other alternative programs include IBM's Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and Zoho--all free--and ThinkFree, which has both a free and a fee-based version.
(3) Few New Features, Nothing Impressive. You can save Word docs to SharePoint--or just copy and paste them in. Other new features include paste preview, so you can preview the page before you paste items into your document--or you could just go ahead and paste the items in, then select undo if you don't like how it looks.
There are a few other minor features. However, I still don't think these are anything to get excited about, and they're certainly not worth the new ‘non-upgradable' price tag.
(4) The Ribbon Changed, but It's Still a Bomb. The only real change worth mentioning on the Ribbon bar is its capability to customize the menus.
I hated it in Office 2007 and I still hate it. After using it for weeks and cursing it daily, I finally purchased a program from AddIn Tools that, when installed, redesigns the Ribbon bar menus back to the old Office 2003 menus.
(5) Simultaneous Editing. [This] is nothing more than a shared document feature.
This not a cool function. It actually creates a lot more confusion than it's worth, especially if you have ever used Adobe Acrobat to perform these same tasks. Every time I have ever used sharing and collaboration in Acrobat, it has resulted in chaos with one user changing what another just wrote or edited causing conflict between all participants because the original is no longer available unless someone had the foresight to make a backup copy.
_________________________________
I was with her until she suggested Corel's WordPerfect. Really?!
