Today I got invited into the closed beta of Microsoft Office Starter 2010. This is brand new version of Office that is expected to hit the… well, it will never hit the store shelves because it’s free. But it’s expected that you will be able to download a final release copy for free in the first half of the year 2010.
What makes Microsoft Office free?
It has an AD! Sorry for capitalization. It’s not needed here actually – the advertisement inside Word and Excel is not that bad. It’s just a sidebar that you cannot (and should not, I guess) hide or change size of. Click on a screenshot above to see how it looks.
What makes free Microsoft Office great?
It has everything average user could ever use or think it’ll be useful sometimes in a distinct future. Also, Office Starter 2010 opens and saves newest .docx Office files fluently which isn’t a surprise, but in addition to that it can open and save OpenDocuments (OpenOffice.org native file format) and export any documents to PDF through the general Save/Save As dialog window.
Both Word Starter and Excel Starter have a startup time comparable with such of OpenOffice.org 3.2 and even a little bit faster. And both of them are working pretty smooth. However, you can spot an hourglass cursor for a second every time the lower right corner banner changes.
Summing up, I can say that Microsoft managed to roll out a great tool which is finally totally competitive with OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. But I would appreciate a lot if it contains a free version of OneNote too.