"A great set of tools for creating presentations, communication and for general work documents."
Rosie Khdir
Home and Business occupies the middle tier of the Office 2010 editions. It comes with all the packages that you will find on the Home and Student edition, with the significant addition of Outlook, which is essential for doing email professionally.
What we like best
Word comes with an excellent new photo-editing feature that will let you import images, resize, change colours and crop them – all without leaving Word.
Excel will allow you to intuitively drill down into the data with some exciting new tools including Sparklines, which lets you insert tiny one cell graphs on each row to allow you to view trends, while the slicer tool lets you analyse specific information and trends on any given row or rows. It also allows for collaborative real-time co-authoring.
PowerPoint’s big new feature is its ability to embed and even edit video content into your PowerPoint presentations, and comes with the same photo editing tools found in Word.
OneNote is a fantastic software application that lets you quickly take down notes, grabbing and posting graphics, basically just being quick and creative before you tidy it all into a new project.
Finally we have the 2010 version of Outlook which is all about keeping connected and in control through intuitive organization and search. It has a new feature called Outlook Social Connector that will allow you to connect to social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as a new and improved rapid search tool called Quick Steps.
What we like least
Of course no software is perfect and the niggles that we found were very slight but may bother some users. The printing options for Outlook are not clear and still limited, making it difficult to print just one page of an email.
Users who have not used the previous 2007 version may also find the ribbon feature a little hard to get accustomed to.
Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 offers enterprise users a great set of tools for creating presentations, communication and for general work documents. It is a package rich with features ideal for business users looking to work collaboratively, but despite being an attractive upgrade, it still has a few minor flaws.
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Features
NEW: video and photo editing features and 3D effects in Excel PowerPoint and Word
Add On
Available as an upgrade
Download or CD
Both
Compatible with
All Windows
System Requirements
- 3 GB hard disk space
- 256 Mb of RAM
- Windows XP - Windows 7
- 500 MHz processor
- 1024 x 768 resolution
Word 2010 has had a massive overhaul. In terms of appearance the big news is that the file tab is back, and the ribbon can now be customised. It may not sound much but lacking these two in Word 2007 was a major complaint for many people.
In terms of functionality the best innovations are the picture editing tools. It’s not going to replace a dedicated picture editing software, but is great for basic edits. You can crop images as well as alter the saturation and tone of colours, apply effects like sharpen and soften, and change brightness and contrast.
The new screen capture tool allows you to directly import screenshots and then edit them as an image.
Microsoft has added new OpenType typography, to really make your document unique, and with SmartArt you can illustrate documents easily, bringing your work to life and making it easier to visualise content.
Printing is now also simpler with print preview and print functions combined so that every time you go to print you can see exactly how it’s going to look, what printer is being used and how many pages you’re printing – time saving and better for the environment.
Microsoft Web apps allow you to work on your documents online, across any device. It’s more efficient and means you won’t end up working on different versions of the same document.
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