Microsoft Office Starter 2010 review

If you buy a new PC or laptop from this summer onwards, chances are it will include Office Starter 2010. We feared the worst when we first heard the news, imagining a version so cut down it would be frustrating to use, but the reality is much better. The starter “suite” comprises only Word Starter and Excel Starter, but they’re both surprisingly fully featured.

In short, you miss out on advanced features targeted at expert or business users. In Word, that means you lose out on tracking changes, for instance; in Excel, Pivot Tables are noticeable by their absence.
All the features most people would consider as core are present, however. Word includes a spelling and grammar checker, a word count and even advanced text effects.

There are no niggling restrictions to printing, saving or sending: this is a fully fledged word processor. It’s a very similar story for Excel. We’ll go into more details on what is and isn’t included later in the review.

Rather surprisingly, you can even take Office Starter with you on your travels – why Microsoft has opted to offer this feature with its most basic edition but not with the full version is beyond us. However, it’s true.

Head to File | Help in either Word Starter or Excel Starter and you’ll see an option that says “Take Office With You”. Press this and, providing you’ve inserted a suitably large USB flash drive into a port (it requires around 400MB of space), all the vital files will be transferred to the drive. You then just plug the drive into a PC and follow the prompts. When the device is removed from a PC, Office Starter is also removed.

The catch

There is a catch to Office Starter, however, and that is a panel down the right-hand side, which measures precisely 208 pixels wide and can’t be resized or removed. It has some use: newcomers might find it handy to have the Getting Started Guide and Help links on permanent view, and it also encourages you to download extra templates and, in Word, clip-art.

In reality, though, that panel is a sales and advertising tool. At launch Microsoft will be pushing upgrades to the full version of Office, with an image that rotates at frequent intervals. As we’ve been typing this short paragraph, it’s switched images three times.

Over time, these frequent updates could become very annoying, and especially so if Microsoft chooses to sell the advertising to third parties. While it’s insisted the space will never be used by more dubious advertisers, pushing anatomy-enhancing pills for example, there’s still a very real possibility you could be distracted from the document you’re working on by a random, attention-grabbing advert.

The other big problem comes if space is limited. Say you want to make Word half-width so you can look at a web browser at the same time; the 208-pixel-wide pane suddenly becomes very intrusive. It will also be a big issue on netbooks with screens that measure just 1,024 pixels wide: you’re losing a fifth of your screen space.

Word Starter 2010: what it can do

One of Word’s great strengths compared to rival word processors is its ability to create professional-looking documents with the minimum of effort. This trend continues with Word Starter, with all the key tools in Word 2010 included here. In particular, you can create themes, insert cover pages, add impact with pictures and apply styles.

Naturally, all the basics are covered, too. There’s a word count, spelling auto-correction and the formatting tools everyone uses – bold, italics, underline – combined with Text Effects for adding advanced effects such as glows, shadows and reflections. Even if you need to whip up a professional report, the tools you need are here: headers, footers, watermarks and much more.

Perhaps most surprisingly, there’s even a mail-merge feature. So, if you have to send out a mailing to all the members of your club you can follow the six-step wizard and either dispatch emails or letters; Outlook isn’t included in Word Starter, but it integrates with Windows Live Mail.

Word Starter 2010: what it can’t do

Students will be disappointed by the wholesale omission of the References tab. This takes away the nifty ability to create an automated table of contents or use Word’s advanced citations tools. Likewise, the Review tab is nowhere to be seen: you can’t add comments, even though you’re able to view other people’s. Nor can you track changes.

There are a number of small omissions people might find annoying, such as Word’s advanced reading views. For example, many people find it useful to opt for a full-screen reading view when checking a document; all you can do in Word Starter is switch between print, web, outline and draft layouts (via the icons at the bottom right of the screen, because the View tab is also missing).

A bigger problem for power users is the lack of macro support. This doesn’t just mean you can’t create macros: even if they’re part of the Word document you’re viewing, Word Starter won’t run them.

Excel Starter 2010: what it can do

While there are many alternatives to Word that people can use quite happily – obvious examples being OpenOffice.org Writer, Google Docs and Zoho – it’s much tougher to find a free spreadsheet application that comes close to Excel. OpenOffice.org, Google and Zoho all provide functional rivals, but they lack the finesse and flexibility of Excel. They’re fine for simple tasks, but little use if you want to present data in professional-looking charts.

Excel Starter loses a large number of the full app’s skills, but if you need to produce a graph or perform simple analysis then it remains a brilliant choice. You can add the same array of colourful charts, benefit from an instant professional look courtesy of colour-coordinated themes, and use all the formulae that can be found in the full-fat version. That’s particularly impressive when you consider the power on offer – right down to the obscure functions that only engineers and statisticians will use.

What’s really useful, though, is the inclusion of the basic formatting tools that most people need to easily present data. Conditional formatting is one obvious example. In what would otherwise be a dry collection of numbers, for example, conditional formatting can instantly draw out “hot” data by adding a red fill to the highest numbers and highlight “cold” data by adding blue to the lowest numbers.
In a similar fashion, Sparklines can add instant trendlines to a row of data, allowing you to pick out the winners and losers at a glance.

Excel Starter 2010: what it can’t do

We suspect some users could use Excel Starter for a decade and never miss one of the features that have been dropped. They tend to focus on the power user. Pivot Tables are arguably the biggest omission, and they will be missed by people who analyse data to any degree. Slicers, a debut feature in Excel 2010, are also omitted, which means that even if you’re analysing a spreadsheet that already includes Pivot Tables you won’t be able to add a slicer to aid analysis.

The Data and Review tab are nowhere to be found, either. Dealing with external data is one of Excel’s most advanced powers, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft has removed it wholesale from Office Starter.

Some of the features found on Review might be missed, however. You can’t add a comment to a spreadsheet in Excel Starter, and nor can you protect cells; a useful tool if you want to share a spreadsheet with others, but you don’t want them to see the data that lies beneath or change any of the values.

Upgrade choice

If you decide you like Office so much you want to buy the full version, it should be no surprise that Microsoft makes this shockingly easy. A Purchase button sits at the right-hand of the Home ribbon in both Excel and Word Starter. Pressing this will take you to a web page containing additional information on how to purchase the version of Office 2010 that Microsoft deems right for your needs, either direct from Microsoft or though one of its partners.

There’s no need to download any more software, as it’s all pre-installed on your system – just locked away. You simply need the right product key, which will either be delivered online or through the post. It shouldn’t take long for the full Office suite you’ve purchased to be up and running.

Be careful, though, that you’re not paying more than you need: if you choose this route, you’ll be paying for a single-use licence that isn’t transferrable to a new PC. Buying a boxed edition of Office 2010 will almost certainly offer much better value for money, as that includes a licence for either two or three installations (for the Home and Business, Home and Student suites respectively).

Conclusion

Despite the restrictions and the annoyance of that ever-present pane, there are many good reasons to stick with Office Starter rather than upgrading to a full suite. For one, it means you’ll be able to open and edit any Word and Excel documents created in Office 2007 or Office 2010 without losing any information. (You can do the same using the Web Apps, but that’s a more cumbersome process.)

What’s more, Office Starter is an excellent introduction to Office 2010: in a way, it gives you an extended trial without any risk. Not everyone gets to grips with the Ribbon, for instance, so switching to Word and Excel Starter will give you an opportunity to see whether you like it or not. Fortunately, you can keep any previous installations of Office intact on your computer and carry on using them, until you come to upgrade to a full version of Office 2010, when the old version will be removed.

Note, however, that Office 2010 Starter isn’t your only option if you’re looking for a free productivity application. OpenOffice is a strong competitor, and also offers a presentation tool and database. Its UI can’t rival Microsoft Office’s, however, and if you open Office documents they won’t always appear as the author intended; graphs opened in the spreadsheet application might look odd, for example.

Office Starter has its foibles, but there’s still plenty of power here – more than enough to make up for any frustrations. It’s amazing that Microsoft has seen fit give away so much.

Details
Software subcategory	Office software
Requirements
Processor requirement	500MHz processor
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	yes
Operating system Windows XP supported?	yes
Operating system Linux supported?	no
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	no
Other operating system support	None