David Flynn18 May 2009, 1:29 PM
Microsoft hasn’t officially opened its preview program for Office 2010 but the beta test build has already hit the Web via BitTorrent...
You don’t have to wait until early next year to try out Office 2010. You don’t even need to cool your heels until July, when Microsoft informs successful applicants to its
Office 2010 Technical Preview program.
Provided you don’t mind breaking the law – something which APCmag does
not recommend, of course – you can grab Office 2010 right now from your favourite BitTorrent download hub. All indications are that this is the same Technical Preview edition as Microsoft will issue in July.
It weighs in at 1.3GB for a combo build containing both the 32-bit and
64-bit editions. You can also fetch the stand-alone files for each
platform but the combo is easily the most popular – when we checked
last night
MiniNova listed just over 1,000 seeds.
Courtesy of BitTorrent, here's the Technical Preview beta of Office 2010 with the lot
And as this is the Professional Plus bundle you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, OneNote, Publisher, InfoPath, Viso and SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove).
Most immediately noticeable is that all Office 2010 applications now sport the same ribbon bar which Microsoft introduced in Office 2007 but limited at the time to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. In addition, the Office ‘orb’ which sits at the top-left of each
application now calls up a larger launch screen instead of a drop-down menu.
The 'orb' icon in Office 2010 – here illustrated with Word 2010 – now shows a single pane instead of a drop-down menu
The software runs on Windows XP SP3, Vista and Windows 7. Under Windows
7 it taps into a few new features of the OS such as the ‘jump list’
shortcut menu which sprouts from the Windows 7 taskbar icon of an
active Office 2010 app.
The jump list for Outlook 2010 when it's installed onto Windows 7