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" Microsoft officially launched its Office 2010 public beta today. The beta isn&amp;#039;t exactly public--it&amp;#039;s mostly available to developers and IT professionals (as well as enthusiasts who illegally download it over torrents). We&amp;#039;ve been playing with the software for about a week now, and have found the interface improvements to be subtle, but welcome.  The biggest news about Office 2010 it its integration with SkyDrive, Microsoft&amp;#039;s online storage service. In addition to 25GB of online storage, Office 2010 users will get Office Web Apps for tinkering with Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs on the go. Obviously, this is a shot directly at Google Docs: Microsoft is trying to offer the best of both worlds--a robust local suite of authoring programs, plus the flexibility to tinker with your documents in the cloud. As far as changes to the program itself go, the new Office maintains the graphical &amp;quot;ribbon&amp;quot; interface that was introduced in Office 2007, but has eliminated the &amp;quot;Office Button,&amp;quot; which had previously served as a confusing replacement for the &amp;quot;File&amp;quot; menu. Office 2010 instead uses what it calls a &amp;quot;Backstage View&amp;quot; that gives previews of files and print options. Overall, the new Office menu architecture somewhat resembles tabbed browsing in Web browsers. There are also a host of cool improvements in Word and PowerPoint that allow limited in-program photo and video editing. There&amp;#039;s something called Sparklines in Excel that instantly shows a small line graph summarizing results inside spreadsheets. There are many small changes to the interface, and we&amp;#039;re likely going to be discovering them for months.  Office is a huge deal for Microsoft, and it remains to be seen if people will see enough benefit in minor tweaks and updates to upgrade immediately. It also remains to be seen if the benefits of cloud computing will impress themselves on Office users. Right now, Office 2010 is going through a public beta phase (not as open as Windows 7&amp;#039;s beta, but still pretty large), and is scheduled to launch in early 2010. We&amp;#039;ll post updates on features and functionality as we continue our own review. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/reviews/a4969/4337226/>