VERSION: 14.0.4006.1110

I have officially gotten hold of Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview and have it now running in a virtual machine for testing. The first thing we notice is that the Office Button has given place to the "Office Tab". Well, the name officially remains as "Office Button", but it does not look like a button to me. It is really a tab, but there you go:

Figure 1 & 2: Office Button (version 12) and Office Tab (version 14)

The cool thing, however, is when you click on this "Office Tab". Now, we have a nice-looking screen where you can choose options from. The feel is similar to the "welcome screen" of Access 2007. I think this is a much cleaner way to expose features than in Microsoft Office 2007:


Figure 3: Office Tab screen

When you click on "Print" for example, instead of the usual Print Dialog Box, you simply get all the necessary stuff on a similar screen. Sweet! However, the thing I did not like was the "back" button. I think it is unnecessary and confusing. It would be better to simply keep the other tabs visible and the user can simply click on a tab and move away from the Office Tab and go about her merry way. I hope Microsoft will realize this is a hindrance and keep all tabs visible.

The contents of the tabs remain pretty much the same except for the "Insert" tab. I will be looking at it tomorrow and posting some of the new stuff. It is time to hit the hay!