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Given that all versions of Windows and Office including XP and 2003 are EOL (or will be fairly shortly), I do have a question. Why should anyone upgrade to MS Office 2010, especially if one is coming from 2007?

Back story: For a long time, I hung onto MS Office 2000 until I was induced to upgrade to Office 2007 because my current college uses it everywhere and I was greatly encouraged to use 2007 instead. Other than the Ribbon interface and some features in MS Word and Excel and PowerPoint, I saw few other reasons to upgrade. I did so about a year ago. I know that right now MS will still support Office 2007 and 2010 for a long while, but when 2007 is EOL, then what? Because I had a Windows 7 laptop earlier in the year, I saw the advantages firsthand of 7 vs. XP. I do not see any real advantages of 2010 vs. 2007. Any thoughts?

Not a heavy user; the only real difference I know of is that Outlook sucks a bit less as an IMAP client.

Well, if you do any database work 2007+ can have it's advantages. Specifically, 2003/2000 Excel is limited to only ~65,000 rows.

Other than that, meh. I have 2007 Ultimate (student deal) and I don't mind using it. The ribbon was troublesome at first, but it's really not that bad. Some things are in really stupid places, but it was like that in 2003/2000 first (I preferred 2000 personally). To be honest, Office is associated with work, so I'd never been really excited to use it in the first place. 2010 looks damn pretty too.

Well I use 2007 on a daily basis, I prefer the interface much more and having the one million rows at my disposal is a big plus. I know if I only had 65,000 rows to work with I would probably hit the limit constantly. My data sets get pretty big when I work with intraday stock tick data. I've only hit the million row limit a handful on times in the past year.

2010 I believe gives you 2 million rows to work with, any data of that size should be worked on with SAS anyways. I think it is also capable of using the gpu to process data. This is huge selling point for me and some of my other colleagues still stuck on 2007. I am jealous of 2010 users for this sole reason. My Excel files approach 50+ mb and have hit 300+ mb occasionally with tons of arrays and it would take me upwards of ten minutes to process anything on a core 2 duo or even to just open a file or even to save and close out. This would really drive me mad if I am on a time limit and not to mention my company charges $250 per hour of work from the research analyst so this is also wasted money.

I'm one of the few that loved the ribbon interface the first time I tried it. I could never find anything in Word 2003, but the ribbon interface just seemed so natural to me. Of course, (most) people will disagree with me, but that's fine.

In terms of the difference between 2007 and 2010, I have 2007 at home and use 2010 at work. From the average user point of view, there really is no difference. They tweaked the File menu a bit in 2010 to enhance it a bit, but other than that I haven't seen any differences. As others have already pointed out, the differences are mostly behind the scenes that the average user will never see.

If you have 2007 already, don't bother upgrading (unless you need 2 million Excel rows)

Outlook finally gets the Ribbon treatment in 2010. To me it is much more usable than before.

I've learned to navigate the Ribbon, but would really prefer a return to the tool bars/button bars from my Office 4.3 through Office 2003 days. It will take me a long time to lose my fondness for Office '97.

Captain Ned wrote:

I've learned to navigate the Ribbon, but would really prefer a return to the tool bars/button bars from my Office 4.3 through Office 2003 days. It will take me a long time to lose my fondness for Office '97.

I have learned to use the Office 2003-esque hot key sequences, that should at least make the sting of Ribbon feel a bit better.

Jive wrote:

... I think it is also capable of using the gpu to process data...

Excel 2010 doesn't support GPU calculation if that is what you mean. They added GPU support for 3D shapes and chart creation. If they could make the GPU do the calculations the speed improvements would be unbelievable even for a system that doesn't have a monster GPU.

From Microsoft:
"Starting in Excel 2010, improvements were made to the graphics platform by adding support for hardware acceleration when rendering 3-D objects. While the GPU can render these objects faster than the CPU, the experience in Excel 2010 depends on the content on your worksheet. If you have a sheet full of 3-D shapes, you will see more benefit from the hardware acceleration improvements than on a worksheet with only 2-D shapes (which do not leverage the GPU)."

Excel 2010 has some other things that have been given the multi-threaded treatment. You can check those out here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 010PerfImp


I think the biggest difference is the ability to use a 64-Bit version of the suite. I guess this would only really matter in Excel and Access with immensely large data sets. I, personally, stuck with Office 2000 Professional until 2007 came out and upgraded to that. I have 2010 on my workstation and notebook but I don't really care which I use.

P4Power wrote:

Jive wrote:

... I think it is also capable of using the gpu to process data...

Excel 2010 doesn't support GPU calculation if that is what you mean. They added GPU support for 3D shapes and chart creation. If they could make the GPU do the calculations the speed improvements would be unbelievable even for a system that doesn't have a monster GPU.

Wow good to know... I would of been very disappointed had i been using Excel 2010 and not found a significant decrease in my processing time.

The biggest advantage for me is that Office 2010 feels a lot faster to use. The applications take much less time to load after the initial load (probably doing some cached prefetch magic) than 2007, and navigating around the UI (i.e. Ribbon) feels faster.

By me, on the contrary - 2010 loads slower than 2007.

Personally, I think there are small refinements in the UI, and the way the program behaves. Powerpoint has some nice features though (when dragging pictures, it shows lines not quite different from photoshop to align the pictures on your slide).

apart from that, the mayor change was from 2003->2007. After that, it's all nearly the same.

I did everything I could to avoid Office 2010. I'm a writer and halfway into my last book I did some work on my sister's computer with Word 2010 and I was very impressed with the writing tools.

I have since switched to 2010. I only use Word though, can't tell you anything about the rest.

2007 was the big jump to the ribbon interface. Some of the menu items are switched, tweaked, moved or are in better logical placements, and the entire suite seems overall snappier. I think Outlook 2010 is better than 07's as well. I'm not sure I'd say it's worth the $ to upgrade from 07 to 2010, but I generally recommend a 2010 Office upgrade.

Seeing as its $98 for a 3 pack non-upgrade, thats what I bought between myself, my father and my wife. Its not free like openoffice, but it also runs a lot better in my experience, plus thats what we're all used to.

Corrado wrote:

Seeing as its $98 for a 3 pack non-upgrade, thats what I bought between myself, my father and my wife. Its not free like openoffice, but it also runs a lot better in my experience, plus thats what we're all used to.

I bought the home and student edition of Office 2007. Sister and mom, $33 bucks for Office ain't bad at all.

Sargent Duck wrote:

I bought the home and student edition of Office 2007. Sister and mom, $33 bucks for Office ain't bad at all.

Exactly. And you get proper support if/when you need it too.

As an end user using it at a medium skill level, between Office 2003 and Office 2010, here are the various features that I found different and useful:

• The Ribbon: Power users and people heavily embedded in their old ways may loath it (and I know there were/still are times when I grumbled and cursed myself), but overall I find the Ribbon enjoyable to use (after the transition period). Using the Ribbon to work with formatting in Word/Excel/PowerPoint is much nicer, and it brings a large number of Outlook functions right to the surface.
• Formatting live previews: Combines with the Ribbon, but being able to mouse-over formatting options and see a live preview of it in my document is huge.
• Additional document formats: The space savings for docx, xlsx, and pptx files can be huge, and it's great being able to save directly to PDF files without having to use some third-party PDF "Printer"
• Larger Excel Workspace: Not that I ever actually do it, but the available row count in Excel, as others have mentioned, is a good feature. And I believe if you add in PowerPivot, your maximum row count becomes limited only by your available memory.
• Easier Style Management in Word: If you're going through and writing 100 page documents with various formatting styles, tables of contents, etc, you'll love the usability enhancements that come with Word 2010.
• OneNote: Working with it more and more at my job. Definitely a better way to take notes and meeting minutes on my laptop than Notepad
• Conditional Formatting in Excel: Much easier to setup conditional formatting rules, and a bunch of stuff predefined for you making it a 1 click process
• Predefined Table formats: 1 click, and your data table becomes much more colourful and presentation friendly. No long spending 15 minutes highlighting rows, setting shade, and changing border thicknesses
• Excel Sparklines and Databars/colour scales: Again, makes Excel very presentation friendly. Micro-charts and quick access KPIs that take 1 click to build.

Just some of the things that I can think of off the top of my head that I use in my job as an IT developer and system administrator. But, if you're only using Office to write 5-10 page school papers, then you might be better suited to save your money.

I find there are a few minor features in Excel 2010 that are huge time savers.
1/ You can paste values or formulas by right-clicking the paste location and hitting 'v' or 'f' respectively.
2/ You can filter by a string straight from the filter menu without having to filter by->contains
3/ You can remove hyperlinks en masse by selecting a range and if any field contains a link, you have the option to 'remove hyperlinks'. Previously, every cell in the selection had to be a link for that option to be available.
4/ It works properly with windows 7's snap function.

Outlook with the Ribbon is nifty (a much more intuitive system over traditional menus, IMHO).
Infopath 2010 separates "designer" from "filler"