Yesterday we released the public beta of Office 2010, you should go download it right now.
There’s a bunch of new stuff, so it’s really hard to predict what’s going to be exciting to you, but here’s the top feature for me: ignore. Yep, ignore. Outlook has built in a big, beautiful chunk of anti-social awesome. You know when you get added to that really long e-mail thread that won’t go away? The one people keep replying to, dragging it on until it sucks the air out of your office through your monitor. Now you can just right-click, select ignore and the thread goes away… even future mails to the thread.
Another of my fav Outlook features: the Quick Steps. They are, at their heart, macros. Select a message and click a quick action to create a task, mark the message read and dump into into a folder all in one button press. I’m currently working on giving my quick steps the GTD treatment.
It’s the nature of my job, I live my life in Outlook. There is, however, a ton of goodness in all the apps. Go checkout the beta site for a run down of what’s new in each of the Office applications. There are features to make your life easier (e.g. multi-user editing of docs) and features to make you look good (e.g. spark lines in Excel).
But can you really use it? Absolutely. I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 on all my machines and only run Office 2010. Sure, it’s a beta, it’s not perfect. But it never stops me from getting my job done. So, If I can live using only the beta, you should feel comfortable at least trying it out for a bit.