It's a love/hate relationship. When Office 2007 came out, you either loved it or hated it. With Office 2010 out now, your hate may soften to accepting the product, and your love will just deepen.

The dismay in Office 2007 centered on the look and feel of the product. The introduction of a new Ribbon, which replaced the standard toolbar in Office 2003, had users grumbling. One was the familiar look that prior Office products held. You could upgrade and the transition was easy.

In Office 2007, Microsoft made a giant leap into the new and unknown, leaving many PC users baffled. The new Ribbon housed a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organized commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The look and feel of the old standby was gone.

Designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible, the Ribbon was either loved or hated. Many gave it a short term shot and went back to using Office 2003.

With Office 2010, Microsoft designed a superior product. Microsoft listened to all the challenges and complaints of users and created a perfect blend. Office 2010 is the best of Office 2003 and Office 2007.

New Features

Those who endured will enjoy a new customizable Ribbon (Users could not customize the Office 2007 Ribbon) so you can organize it according to your needs. A modified Ribbon is now available in all Office applications, and it now includes the "File" option and a new feature called "Backstage View," giving easy access to task-centered functions such as printing and sharing. Read more on love hate relationship

Get excited! Backstage view incorporates the most commonly used actions in one place (no more dialog boxes with tabs). And there's more! You get the usual open, save and print, and you also get several templates for new documents, print layouts and ways to share your work, all without dialog boxes and tabs, everything is much more easily accessible.

Additional features include:

• A Paste preview which lets you switch between paste options so you can make sure that your work will be formatted correctly
• Role orientation tailored to employees in "roles" such as research and development professionals, sales persons, and human resources
• A built-in screen capture tool for easy internet copy and paste
• A background removal tool for editing photos and clip art within a document
• SmartArt templates and author permissions so you can create wonderful documents even though you're not an artist
• New text and image editing effects; making it easy to be the pro
• Live collaboration functions; great for the office
• New animations in PowerPoint 2010; insert videos directly into PowerPoint
• A Social Connector that 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