Office 2010 Hits Release to Manufacturing Milestone

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. […]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.

Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.

32 Comments Comment from the forums

pbrigido

I'm probably not going to purchase it, but I am interested in testing it out to see what new it brings over 2007.
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Computer_Lots

I've been using the 2010 Beta for several months now and I like it. I might actually purchase 2010. I figured I owe it to MS to buy a copy since I've obtained the last 5 releases for free one way or another :)
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505090

i haven't noticed that much difference for 2007 I'll probably roll back to that when the tech preview quits working
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zorky9

No thanks. I noticed the interface changes, but the functionalities are all essentially the same as with Office 2007. I'll skip this version.
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theholylancer

until they have an option (an option not the default) to kill ribon and bring back the old file menu interface... the whole new thing for excel is stupid beyond stupid that don't allow you to easily change aspects of the graph, and instead of playing around with it i reloaded office 2k3 to finish my school work.
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bourgeoisdude

theholylanceruntil they have an option (an option not the default) to kill ribon and bring back the old file menu interface... the whole new thing for excel is stupid beyond stupid that don't allow you to easily change aspects of the graph, and instead of playing around with it i reloaded office 2k3 to finish my school work.
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.
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warezme

are they changing all their extensions again? xlsy, docy, maybe?
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nevertell

I'd rather stick with open office.
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Bolbi

warezmeare they changing all their extensions again? xlsy, docy, maybe?Nope. I've been using the beta (liking it a lot), and the extensions are the same as Office 2007.

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Bolbi

nevertellI'd rather stick with open office.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.
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