ESP Projects Ltd: IT Support - Sheffield

It started back in June, just as the Office 2010 licence arrived on our doormat and the first couple of brave technical staff ventured into the unknown. Its only August, but already it appears that the latest version of Word, Excel & Outlook has won us over. Indeed, the majority of staff are either working entirely from Office 2010 or are keen to take the plunge. So what have we learnt?

The first point is about usability. The new ‘look’ - the ‘ribbon’ first introduced in Office 2007 - proved a lot less hard to work with than we initially feared. Admittedly, many of us Office 2003 veterans were expecting to find that menu options we once knew and loved had been removed or hidden away. Yet in practise we’ve had to admit defeat. Everything I’ve needed thus far has been right there on an icon in front of me rather than buried away – exactly as MS intended. Not only that, but some things – recent documents, printing, mail merges, styling previews – have even become easier!

Secondly, we need to talk ‘compatibility’. Most will have picked up by now that Microsoft introduced a new format for files made with Office 2007. This new format persists in Office 2010. So, Office 2007 and Office 2010 are fully compatible with each other, but Office 2003 users may have problems converting files made in either software. There are two ways of looking at this – one is to set up Office 2010 to always save in the 2003 format and that’s easily done. The second however is to accept the change. After all, if we continued saving in the same format forever, we wouldn’t even have colour in our documents! The choice is of course yours, the key for us is to make you aware of this before you upgrade.

Thirdly, lets talk about licensing. As usual, this is an area fraught with unimaginable complexity, too difficult to unpack in a short article. What we can say though is this:

• If you have recently bought Office 2007 from CTX, you might get the licence for Office 2010 free of charge!
• If you buy Office on a volume licence from ESP (most of our customers), you will now be buying Office 2010 each time your purchase Office. But you ARE permitted to install a previous version under that licence, so you don’t have to have it! You can also install it on any of your computers, as long as you have enough licences to cover it.
• For Small Business customers, the most economical way to obtain Office 2010 is to buy it ‘OEM’ from us, at the same time as buying a new computer. With this form of licence, only Office 2010 can be installed. And, it can only ever be installed on the new computer. However, for small businesses, this method of purchasing is around half the cost of buying it as a volume licence!

Any other installation considerations? Well, yes, there are a few! Firstly off, you must have at least Windows XP, but more than that, if your current PCs are running slowly under XP and Office 2003, Office 2010 will not improve matters. Technically the ‘system requirements’ are quite low, but in practical terms Office 2010 will run a more slowly than 2003, it’s as simple as that.

Compatibility with existing systems is of course another major concern. We noticed for example that Word 2010 seemed unable to do a mail merge from Excel 2010 (bizarrely it needed to see our ‘source’ spreadsheets in Excel 2003 format). And also the upgrade from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2010 was not as smooth as it could have been. If your organisation has a lot of complex spreadsheets, macros, Access databases, Outlook profiles, or documents that are linked to one another (like mail merges, label print runs etc..) we highly recommend you take a backup of these and pilot the use of Office 2010 on one or two machines before installing on more. This should also give you an idea of what the training requirements for your staff are likely to be.

Finally, there is the deployment itself to consider. Like its predecessors, Office can be installed one PC at a time, or centrally deployed from a server (facilities permitting).  ESP can of course do either. If you run a server, this could be an ideal time to switch to centralised deployment not just of Office but other software too!

In conclusion, Office 2010 is looking good. It may not be worth upgrading straight away, but its sure to take off before long. If you’d like to talk to someone about this, please do not hesitate to contact us!