Ms Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 is a productivity suite for Microsoft Windows, and the successor to Microsoft Office 2007. Office 2010 includes extended file format support, user interface updates, and a refined user experience. With the introduction of Office 2010, a 64-bit version of Office is available, although not for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. Office 2010 does not support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
On April 15, 2010, Office 2010 was released to manufacturing, with those Volume Licensing customers who have Software Assurance being able to download the software from April 27, 2010. The suite became available for retail as well as online purchase on June 15, 2010.

Office 2010 marks the debut of free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, which work in popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. A new edition of Office, Office Starter 2010, replaced the low-end home productivity software, Microsoft Works.

Microsoft's update to its mobile productivity suite, Office Mobile 2010, will also be released for Windows Phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Phone 7. In Office 2010, every application features the Ribbon, including OneNote, Publisher, InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace (previously known as Groove), and the new Office Web Apps.

History and development

Development started in 2007 while Microsoft was finishing work on Office 12, released as Microsoft Office 2007. The version number 13 was skipped due to the aversion to the number 13.It was previously thought that Office 2010 (then called Office 14) would ship in the first half of 2009.

On January 10, 2009, screen shots of an Office 2010 alpha build were leaked by a tester.

On April 15, 2009, Microsoft confirmed that Office 2010 would be officially released in the first half of 2010. They announced on May 12, 2009 at a Tech Ed event, a trial version of the 64 bit edition.

An internal post-Beta build was leaked on July 12, 2009, newer than the official preview build and including a "Limestone" internal test application.

On July 14, 2009, Microsoft started to send out invitations on Microsoft Connect to test an official preview build of Office 2010. On August 30, 2009, the beta build 4417 was leaked on the internet via torrents.

The public beta has been available to subscribers of TechNet, MSDN and Microsoft Connect users as of November 16, 2009. On November 18, 2009, the beta was officially released to the general public at the Microsoft Office Beta website which was originally launched by Microsoft on November 11, 2009 to provide screenshots of the new office suite. Office 2010 Beta is a free, fully functional version, and will expire on October 31, 2010.

In a concerted effort to help customers and partners with deployment of Office 2010, Microsoft launched an Office 2010 application compatibility program with tools and guidance available for immediate download. On 5 February 2010, the official release candidate build, build 4734.1000, was available to Connect and MSDN testers. It was leaked to torrent sites. A few days after, the RTM Escrow build was leaked.

Microsoft announced the RTM on April 15, 2010 and that the final version was to have speech technologies for use with text to speech in Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Word. Office 2010 was to be originally released to business customers on May 12, 2010. Business customers with Software Assurance were able to get it since April 27, 2010 and other Volume Licensing customers were able to get it since May 1. MSDN and TechNet subscribers have been able to download the RTM version since April 22, 2010. The RTM version number was 14.0.4760.1000.

On June 15, 2010, Office 2010 was released to retail customers.

New features and Improvements
Office 2010 is more "role-based" than previous versions.[6] There are features tailored to employees in "roles such as research and development professionals, sales persons, and human resources." Borrowing from ideas termed "Web 2.0" when implemented on the Internet, Microsoft incorporated features of SharePoint Server in Office 2010.

Microsoft Office 2010 includes updated support for ISO/IEC 29500:2008, the International Standard version of Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.[27] In its pre-release (beta) form, however, Office 2010 only supported the Transitional variant, and not the Strict. The intent of the ISO/IEC is to allow the removal of the Transitional variant from the ISO/IEC compliant version of the OOXML standard. Microsoft Office 2010 supports OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1, which is an OASIS standard.

New features also include a built-in screen capture tool, a background removal tool, a protected document mode, new SmartArt templates and author permissions. The 2007 "Office Button" was replaced with a menu button that leads to a full-window file menu, known as Backstage View, giving easy access to task-centered functions such as printing and sharing. A notable accessibility regression from 2007 is that the menu button no longer follows Fitts's law. A modified Ribbon interface is present in all Office applications, including Office Outlook, Visio, OneNote, Project, and Publisher. Office applications also have functional jumplists in Windows 7, which would allow easy access to recent items and tasks relevant to the application. Features of Office 2010 include:

    * Ribbon interface and Backstage View across all applications
    * Background Removal Tool
    * Letter Styling
    * The Word 2007 Equation editor is common to all applications, replacing MS Equation 3.0
    * New SmartArt templates
    * New text and image editing effects
    * Screen Capturing and Clipping tools
    * Live collaboration functions
    * Jumplists in Windows 7
    * New animations in Powerpoint 2010

A new feature in Microsoft Office 2010 is the Social Connector. This allows users to write emails while keeping track of their family, friends, and colleagues by viewing status updates and past communication history with the individual. When users view their emails a name, picture, and title is available for the person they are contacting. Upcoming appointments can also be viewed with this new feature and users can request friends. The Social Connector does not work with Office x64 bit versions and Microsoft suggests to use the 32 bit products on their official forums and support. Sync features for Windows Mobile phones like email, contacts and other integration will also not work with x64 versions of Office 2010. There is no information if the final releases coming up in a few days will patch this feature. To date, many features and integrations are missing from the x64 version of Office 2010.

Removed features

The following features are removed from Microsoft Office 2010.

Removed from the entire suite

    * Microsoft Office Document Imaging application
    * Microsoft Office Document Scanning application
    * Office Diagnostics tool
    * Support for MSXML version 5
    * Research and Reference pane for Internet Explorer

Features removed from Microsoft Word

    * Smart Tag auto-recognition
    * Person Name smart tag
    * AutoSummary feature
    * Support for Word Add-in Libraries (WLL)

Features removed from Microsoft Access

    * Access Calendar ActiveX control
    * Replication Conflict Viewer
    * Data access pages

Features removed from Microsoft Outlook

    * ANSI offline Outlook data files (.ost) for Exchange synchronization
    * Calendar rebasing tool
    * DAV connectivity for HTTP account types
    * Exchange 2000 connectivity
    * Exchange Message Security feature support
    * Postmarks

Features removed from Microsoft PowerPoint

    * Macro recorder
    * Save as Web Page feature

Features removed from Microsoft Publisher

    * The ability to create new Web Publications