Office 2010 Hits Release to Manufacturing Milestone
Office 2010 is DONE. Will you be upgrading your copies of 2003 or 2007?
A new Microsoft Office suite is officially complete and now in the hands of replicators printing up discs for sale. Microsoft made the announcement late last week in its official Office 2010 TechNet blog.
I am very excited to share some great news with you. Earlier today we reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!
RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone. It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products. Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version – that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads! The feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we’re excited about, and that I’m sure will delight our customers.
Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these productswill be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.
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Office 2010 will first become available in retail stores in June in the US, and customers can pre-order these retail versions of Office 2010 at http://store.microsoft.com/OfficePreorder today to receive Office when it becomes available.

Looks like you'll be using Office 2003 for a long time then. They're not going to bring back the old file menus. Time to move on.
Using the 2010 beta myself. At work we're still using Office 2003 but the number of Office 2k7 docs popping up with 2k7 specific features is increasing. We will most likely be upgrading to 2010 in the near future.
As for upgrading from 2k7 to 2k10...I'm not sure it'd be worth it. Honestly there aren't enough new features IMO to warrant an upgrade. Then again some of the new Excel features could be attractive to some, and Sharepoint 2k10 has some attractive new features as well.
Nope. I've been using the beta (liking it a lot), and the extensions are the same as Office 2007.
I like OpenOffice alright, but MS Office has more features, a nicer interface (I like the Ribbon), and most importantly for me, a huge, searchable clipart collection. OpenOffice (even w/Openclipart) simply can't match MS Office's collection. I use those all the time to decorate birthday cards, kids use it to print up animal pictures for school science problems, etc. It's much better than poring through Google Images and still having to worry about copyrights.
The changes to the file name extensions were due to them being completely new types of files based on XML. That hasn't changed this time around, and probably will never happen again...it's also not something that I would say was a bad thing.
I'll keep office 2003 & 2007 + Open Office on my test machine for dev purpose, but 2010 is definitely going on my main computer (currently has 2007).
About the debate OpenOffice vs MS Office... well, i think they are just 2 different products and both have a market as they fulfill different sets of needs/requirements. Now, for my needs, it's MS Office; cannot do with OO.
i understand the change and why it was necessary, but never say never when speaking about computers. you will look dumb in five years.
For word processing and basic spreadsheets i can mostly agree. For highly complex excel documents, nope. For presentation, not quite as impressive (although Apple's keynote blows PPT away). Access is easily replaced by other apps, but not if you need integration with other software/people. Visio can't be replaced, nor can project, and full native SharePoint integration alone is worth the cost of office vs free alternatives to most companies that use project teams for any efforts. Outlook's Exchange integration is simply bettter than any competing offering. Also native integration with SCCM deployment tools and Microsoft monitoring solutions, rights management, and more, very important.
generic home users, sure freeware alternatives work. True business application use, sorry, Microsoft costs more, but everything else gets cheaper and more productive using it well in excess of the cost.
I already own M$ Office 2003. I see nothing new in Office 2010 that would compell me to shell out $300.00 for it. Of course M$ will probably come out with a patch that will make it so that Office 2003 can't run under Windows7.