Microsoft Office's Last Stand

Microsoft Office is already pretty useful, as evidenced by the fact that almost everyone who works in an office uses it in some way. But its competition is growing. That put extra pressure on Microsoft (MSFT) to make the latest version of Office particularly good:

Office 2010 offers lots of new features and several user-interface improvements over previous versions. One nice addition allows you to preview how text or images you're copying will look before you paste them. (Watch this video for a better idea of how this works.) Microsoft has also expanded the "ribbon" interface first seen in Office 2007—the tab bar across the top of the screen that replaces the cumbersome drop-down menu commands found in old versions of Office. The ribbon takes a bit of time to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it speeds up a lot of what you do in Office. Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft has built several collaborative features into the new Office. Co-workers can now simultaneously edit Word and Excel documents—something that many people now turn to Google Docs to do.

Read more about the pros and cons of Office 2010 here.