In July of this year, Microsoft introduced a new version of the Microsoft Office 2010 software package to the Russian mass market. It is sold in stores for about 3,000 rubles. Vedomosti tested Office 2010 for a week on a demonstration Toshiba Satellite L650D laptop. The laptop worked fine, but sometimes it slowed down and buzzed while charging, which, I hope, is not related to the increased demands of Office on computer performance.

What interested me most was how Word, Excel, and Power Point had changed, as well as the email program.

I am a journalist, and I need Word exclusively for writing texts. And any changes are usually annoying, be it a "ribbon" interface (toolbars divided by tabs into separate modules) instead of the usual "drop-down" one, offers to save the document in different formats (template, OpenDocument, PDF, XPS, etc.) or other complications that are not really needed by the average user.

But there are, of course, some positives to the changes. For example, Microsoft specialists have established that when working in Word, the most common operation is “copying,” and the second most popular is “cancel,” since the copied text does not always look as it should: there are problems with formatting, fonts, etc. And in the new Office, you can pre-select the format in which the copied piece will be pasted (you can see what the different options look like in a special window). Fonts and various artistic effects have also been added – pictures, Smart Art (frames of various shapes and colors), diagrams that are easy to process and immediately insert into documents. This obviously improves the perception of the text, but is unlikely to be needed in everyday work by most users. According to Microsoft’s own data, there are about 750 million of them worldwide.

Tables in Excel 2010 can be made much more visual. A boring table with numerical data can be presented in the form of a multi-colored diagram in two mouse clicks, and table cells can be marked with different elements (multi-colored circles, squares, arrows, etc.), visually grouping the necessary data together. It is interesting to tinker with this, and the tables really do become more readable, the information is grasped faster.

I have never had to make presentations before, so I usually dealt with PowerPoint only as a listener and viewer. But in the new version of this program, everything is quite simple: placing a picture, a graphic element (including a diagram with a large number of elements) and even a video fragment on a slide is not difficult. The image database is quite decent, but even more pictures are downloaded from the Internet if the computer is connected to it. The finished presentation can be voiced and sent to viewers by mail (I have not tested this function, however).

The mail service in the new Office is integrated with the instant messaging service (messenger) and social networks for the first time, so now you can send emails directly from the messenger and, conversely, receive short messages and notifications about what your friends write on social networks in your mailbox. Moreover, such letters are grouped by topic, like in Gmail, and you don’t have to spend a long time searching for them in the general flow of messages.

And perhaps the main innovation of Office 2010 is the ability for several users to work together on documents, presentations or a One Note diary, even if they are in different countries. I watched this happen and was impressed, although the procedure for accessing documents did not seem the easiest to me. But in general, the changes in Microsoft Office 2010 are probably for the better and are perceived more easily than the transition to Microsoft Office 2003 from earlier versions of the program.

Vedomosti tests Microsoft Office 2010: Office with color pictures