Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus is a special version of the popular productivity suite aimed at developers, IT managers and other professionals.
I tested the Technical Preview released a few months ago, and happily I've found a bunch of new features and improvements in this beta. For starters, the Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus pack includes a bunch of apps for you to test: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, Communicator, SharePoint Workspace and Outlook with Business Contact Manager - unlike the Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business edition, which ony features five apps.
As regards appearance, all the Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus apps have been slightly modified. They still keep the ribbon interface – in a much clearer, almost minimalist style – but the Office button has been renamed to "File" and now shows a different pane. Not only does it include direct access to all document-related tasks, but also shows detailed information about the document you're currently working on.
Leaving changes aside, the truth is that Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus has pretty much the same features we already saw in the Technical Preview. The context menu in Word, for example, has been greatly improved and lets you see changes in real time as you browse through the different options. You can now add videos to your PowerPoint presentations, remove redundant messages from conversations in Outlook and insert small color charts inside cells in Excel spreadsheets. There are also tools to translate text, take and use screenshots, and apply special effects to the images you use in your documents. What's more, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus now lets you save your documents on SkyDrive and share them online in just two clicks.
Regarding performance, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus seems to be as fast and light on system resources as the Technical Preview. There's a significant improvement in the time the suite apps take to launch, and how they behave when working on your documents.
In all, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus is an excellent productivity suite with great new features that make it easier and more comfortable to use, and also turn it into an even more professional solution for daily work tasks.
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus lets you fully test the new, long-awaited version of the world's most popular productivity suite.
