Microsoft Office 2010 Now Available

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While competing office suites like Apple’s iWork and even the open source Open Office are gaining some decent market share, Microsoft Office is the undisputed king when it comes to such software. The last version, Microsoft Office 2007, was good, sure, but it had some problems with hogging resources that turned many users to the above mentioned competiting office suites.

Luckily, Microsoft is looking to remedy all of the woes users have been facing with Office 2007 with their latest version, 2010. Introduced in beta form some time ago, Microsoft Office 2010 featured faster loading times and overall faster productivity giving consumers everything they wanted (within reason).

Well, after being in beta for quite some time time, Microsoft has finally taken the time to finalize the software and pushing it out to consumers making it available today.

As always, Microsoft is pushing the software out in various packages. First of all, Home and Student will retail for $150 and include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Bump it up a level and you’ll also get Outlook in the Office Home and Business edition for $280. Step up one more level and you’ll get everything that was mentioned above in addition to Access and Publisher for $50.

However, that’s not all Microsoft is announcing today; alongside Office 2010, Hotmail is also getting an upgrade. Working to provide users with deeper Office Web App integration, the new Hotmail will also feature attachment limits of up to 10GB utilizing their SkyDrive service.

While Hotmail’s market share has declined significantly in the previous years due to competition from Google’s GMail (among other services) perhaps the latest updates will help coax users back to their mail service. Then again, they’re going to have to do something very intuitive with the UI before winning back current GMail users.

Are you guys planning on picking up Microsoft Office 2010? If so, which version?