I feel like Willy Wonka when he got his golden ticket. Finally, I received my invitation from Microsoft Connect to download the Office 2010 Technical Preview. Previously I’d been using the leaked version that my grandmother had downloaded from some torrent site or other, but now I can use a legitimate copy. The big bonus of receiving the official invite is that it gives you access to documentation that explains what’s new in Office 2010. The following documents are available to beta testers:

• Microsoft® Office 2010 Top 10’s
• Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Reviewer’s Guide
• Inside Microsoft Office
• Videos – Access 2010 redesigned
• Office Resource Kit Technical Preview Documentation (OfficeResourceKit)

There are other helpful downloads but they’re related to things like troubleshooting install issues and Business Contact Manager etc. I’m not sure what the Office Resource Kit is, so I’ve not downloaded that yet.

This is the entire selection of downloads available to those invited:

• Microsoft® Office Professional 2010
• Microsoft® Visio® 2010
• Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2010
• Microsoft® InfoPath® 2010
• Microsoft® SharePoint® Workspace 2010
• Business Contact Manager for Microsoft® Outlook® 2010
• Microsoft® Outlook® Connector
• Microsoft® Office Language Pack 2010 – English
• Business Contact Manager for Microsoft® Outlook® 2010 Language Pack – Japanese
• Microsoft® Office Language Pack 2010 – Japanese/???
• Business Contact Manager for Microsoft® Outlook® 2010 Database Tool

If you get an invite to download the Technical Preview, you’ll get the choice to download the file in the “usual way”, i.e. click on the link and then choose somewhere on your hard drive to save the file and the download proceeds. However, you’ll also be given the opportunity to download it using the Microsoft File Transfer Manager. This is by far the better option (or at least it was for me) because the Technical Preview download is a little over 500 Mb and can take age to download in the conventional manner.

However, the instructions for using this tool are pretty well hidden, so I wrote an article on how to download using the Microsoft File Transfer Manager.

Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Reviewer’s Guide

The Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Reviewer’s Guide is available for download and was published on 7/27/2009 so at the time of writing it’s fairly up to date. This is a really useful document because it contains information about what’s new in each of the programs that comprise Office 2010.

It would take a while to go through each and every enhancement made to the individual programs, so here is an overview of what enhancements are common to all applications:

• Backstage View:  brings together commands that affect the whole document or application. Each application has its own identifying colour.
• Customisable Ribbon: don’t like the current setup? Create your own tabs and add your own selection of commands to it.
• Presence Information: tells you who is modifying your document and allows you to initiate a conversation with them – all within the application.
• Paste Preview: waste time by pasting content into a document and then undoing because I don’t like the formatting?? Not me. I use Paste Preview to see what the content would look like before I go ahead and make the change.

Tags | download, technical preview, what's new