Versions and Dates of Office 2010 Announced

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that "Office 2010 will be finished and ready to send to manufacturers in the first half of next year." Besides that, Office 2010, formerly known under its code name "Office 14", is going to be released in two different flavors: 32-bit and 64-bit, making it the first Office to support both platforms. Another interesting tidbit is the ad-supported, free, and reasonably slimmed-down, Web-based version of Office 2010, which was announced at the Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, September 2008. Businesses, which want to use the Web-based version without the ads, will have to pay a fee to Microsoft.

The Office suite is going to include Word 14, Excel 14, Powerpoint 14, Outlook 14, Access 14, InfoPath Designer 14, InfoPath Filler 14, Publisher 14, Groove 14, InterConnect 14, SharePoint Designer 14, OneNote 14, Visio 14, and Project 14.

Further, "Microsoft plans to let hundreds of thousands of people test a technical preview of the new Office portfolio starting in the third quarter of 2009, Capossela," a senior vice president in the Microsoft group that makes Office, "said. The company did not say whether average PC users will have a chance to test a more polished beta version."