Microsoft Office 2010 Gives You The Ribbons You’ve Not Been Craving

The new version of Microsoft Office software package, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and other programs, is coming out soon, and Tony Bradley over at PC World magazine is giving you the top 5 reasons it’s worth spending a large amount of money in the middle of a severe economic downturn to get Office 2010. Those reasons are:

1. Microsoft Office 2010 has ribbons. Ribbons are a new way of organizing menus that is supposed to be “more intuitive”, but are difficult to learn how to use, says Bradley, which would mean that they’re, um, not actually very intuitive.

2. There’s a button at the top of the screen in Office 2010 applications that takes people to tasks they might want to do, kind of like, um, the ribbons are supposed to do.

3. There’s a new function that allows people to see what they’re about to cut and paste before they cut and paste it, and then choose whether to not cut and paste it, instead of just cutting and pasting something and undoing the cut and paste if it doesn’t turn out exactly right.

4. There’s a new ability in Microsoft Excel to allow a teeny eeny weeny preview of a graph in just one spreadsheet cell.

5. The Microsoft Outlook program will now have the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector integrated into email functions. There are, after all, a huge, huge number of people using the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector… at least 30.

For the sake of these functions, we’re supposed to be eager to update to Microsoft Outlook 2010. As for myself, I’m not chomping at the bit. The truth is that I stopped using Microsoft Office applications for just about everything about a year ago. Office has, for years, been the worst combination of intrusive and demanding, and with every incarnation, it seems to just get worse. I’m using plain text programs to write in, because they don’t have a lot of heavy functions that get in the way of me getting the words out. For most other things, Google Documents is working just fine – and it’s free.