Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Business (Disc Version)

The user interface is a little more elegant than in the 2007 version. The programs feel otherwise the same. Outlook starts by default in conversation view, which might be a little disconcerting at first when viewing and deleting emails vs conversations (more than once I've inadvertently deleted a conversation instead of an email that was part of the conversation), but it gains the unified ribbon look. Word feels the same as the 2007 version. Excel gains sparkline charts and a couple of other features; it's, however, still plagued by the same flaws as its predecessor, especially the buggy page view, which sometimes forget your pagination settings (switches from letter size to legal or 11x17), selects 4 or 5 rows at a time instead of one, and so on. It works otherwise quite well. Powerpoint is the usual pig with lipstick. It's competent, but lags behind Apple Keynote when it comes to creating classy presentations.


For all of the apps, I like the new print dialog window a lot: it's big, clear, with a nice preview feature.
In general, $240+ for this suite seems a little too much. It still feels like an office suite from the '90s with some lipstick on. I was hoping that the 2010 version of Excel would take some clues from Apple Numbers, the spreadsheet application in iWork '09, which sports some cool tricks like multiple tables instead of one giant grid, alignment guidelines, and more tricks in the graphics department. I design lots of spreadsheets for reporting purposes, some of them for big clients that want slick-looking reports. It's still much easier and faster to create gorgeous reports using Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in the iWork suite than it is in Microsoft Office at 4 or 5 times the price.
Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Business (Disc Version)